This week sees the release of an amazingly significant game.
This isn't big.
This is fucking monumental!!!
A few years back, a guy named Christian Whitehead, known in the Sonic Fanboy community as The Taxman, created a Sonic general purpose game engine, known as Retro Engine. Rather than focusing on remaking one particular game, he instead battled the odds to create an engine that could be used to recreate any of the old Megadrive levels, as well as create your own brand new ones.
The engine was lovingly crafted, and everyone loved it.
Then Sega stepped in.
Everyone expected the engine to suddenly vanish without a trace, but instead, something unexpected happened.
Sega actually hired Taxman to recreate the classic Sonic CD, using his Retro Engine. He did, and it was released over various systems, last year.
It proved so successful, that they've let him do it again.
This time, he and fellow Sonic Community member Stealth (! Simon Thomley) have been asked to recreate the original Sonic The Hedgehog.
To recap : SEGA have asked FANBOYS to recreate THEIR MOST IMPORTANT GAME!!!!
This is seriously huge! It also means that Taxman and Stealth spent time recreating a game that they both love, and have made what is easily one of the best versions of Sonic The Hedgehog that you'll ever play in your life.
This isn't a rush job.
This isn't even a straight port.
And it sure as hell isn't a shitty Sega style "Emulator and Rom" crapfest.
Sonic, Tails and Knuckles are all in there. Fully playable for the first time, ever, in an official Sega release.
There's time attack for each and every level.
Sonic 1, with a Spindash!!!
And don't get me started on the enormous amount of extras lying in the Cheat/Debug menu! OH MY GOD!!!!
(Start a "No Save" game, Tap SEGA in order, then hold both your thumbs down until the new menu appears. For Debug mode, play music tracks 1,9,9,1,0,6,2,3 then ingame tap on the Score to switch between Debug and normal.)
If you buy any Sonic game, this year, make it this one.
Let Sega know that you love that they've done this.
Sonic The Hedgehog is available for iOS and Android. It's got a Japan-Boxart styled icon, so you'll know which one it is!
Note 1 : I was up until 3am playing this thing. Hence why today's newsletter is late!
Note 2 : This doesn't happen all the time. In fact, this is pretty much the first time I've ever heard of it happening. In 99.9% of cases, the IP owner will instead simply shut you down. The likely reason this was successful was that it wasn't originally a "remake", and instead more of a "reusable engine".
In other Sonic news, a beta demo version of Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast has recently been uncovered.
For the most part, this isn't news, but if you know what Sonic Beta folk are like, you'll know that the second it was released to the community, a boatload of community members spent hours ripping through the thing, trying to dig out every single minor change that they could.
Remarkably, they pretty much instantly found the holy grail of Sonic Adventure Beta items.
In early screenshots, Tails, Big the Cat and other characters were seen in a level which never actually showed up in the final game.
.. Guess what level's in the demo!!
"Beta Windy City" seems to contain a lot of Test elements, so it's probably more a case of it being a simple test level, as opposed to a full-on level proper, but it's still fascinating to see things like that existing in what was a fairly late version of the game.
Nice discovery, and plenty of good reading ahead.
.. If you're into that sort of thing.
What happens when Jay isn't in the mood to code?
He codes a picture!!
(... And plays a lot of Sonic, apparently.) socoder.net/?topic=3506
; Helping Out
Steve has decided to volunteer at a local health organisation, and they've apparently let him take over their website! Blimey! socoder.net/?topic=3503
; Tweaking The Monkey
Spinal's been tugging away, this week, trying to get his Monkey to splatter it's contents all over his TV screen.
... Or something.. socoder.net/?topic=3504
; Deep In The Depths of SoCoder
Seems that Jay finally figured out what was causing that Unicode issue.
Hopefully nothing else has broken since he fixed it..
... Maybe. socoder.net/?topic=3502
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- The Anti-Sega
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
; Xbone
In what can only be described as "Worst Announcement Ever!!!!", Microsoft unleashed their badly titled TV box, this week.
Named the Xbox One (because nobody ever referred to the original Xbox as that, honest!) Microsoft are once again hoping to take over control of your TV, just like the last seventy thousand attempts at Set-Top-Boxes that they've had over the years.
They've decided to call it Xbox One because it's designed as an all in one unit.
... or at least, an all in one unit with three parts..
There's the Box, the Kinect and the Controller. .. And if you actually want to use it as a TV viewer, you'll need a TV Set-Top-Box, too.
Oh, and a TV, of course!
In sharp contrast to Sega's fanboy love, Microsoft are also raging an all out war on folk who DARE attempt to resell their games.
"You think, just because you paid £50 for a game that only lasted a few hours, that you have the right to get rid of it?! Or even worse, lend it to a mate!!? Fuck you!!!"
That may or may not be an exact quote. socoder.net/?topic=3508
