Sonic Mania wasn’t the only new Sonic game revealed at the 25th Anniversary Party. At the end of the stream, Takashi Iizuka revealed the debut trailer for Sonic Team’s next game. Like Sonic Generations, the game will feature both Modern Sonic and Classic Sonic. However, Iizuka stressed that this isn’t a sequel, so it’s not Generations 2.
It also appears that the game will have a dark and serious story line. If so, hopefully it won’t be as bad as the series’ previous attempts at having one of those. The game doesn’t have a name yet aside from a working title, Project Sonic 2017, but they did announce that it’ll be released on PS4, Xbox One, NX (!) and PC during Holiday 2017.
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Holy shit.
Sega is working together with Christian Whitehead, Headcannon and PadogaWest Games to make Sonic Mania, a new 2D game featuring brand new zones alongside re-imagined versions of old zones.
People at the 25th Anniversary Party can play a demo featuring a re-imagined Green Hill Zone and a new zone called Studiopolis Zone right now. Sega has also given out a goody bag with an USB stick that includes one of the songs from the game, which will undoubtedly be put online sooner than later.
Sonic Mania will be released on PS4, Xbox One and PC in Spring 2017, and we can’t wait to play it.
Summer Games Done Quick is back again this year, and Wednesday is their Sonic block. You’ll get to see runs of Sonic Colors on Nintendo DS, Sonic Riders, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and the fan favorite Sonic the Hedgehog (2006).
Summer Games Done Quick is the annual event, like its alternate event Awesome Games Done Quick, is a week-long charity marathon that helps raise money for the Doctors Without Borders. Donating during each run also puts you n for raffles to win prizes. Be sure to tune in, check the schedule and watch how Sonic has gotta go fast.
Multiplayer Showcase is the review show where you get to see me and some friends of mine play multiplayer games that have been long forgotten and give it a proper analysis by sharing our opinions on the game in a roundtable discussion to see how things have held up for gaming’s past brightest stars and lowest points.
This episode compares the boxing gloves to the green shells with the Mario Kart-inspired Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing. I never got to play this game much with friends locally. I’ve certainly played it online some time ago, but as you might recall, there are limitations added when playing online, so playing with a group of people with everything unlocked lets everyone dig in for some four player action coupled with SEGA nostalgia.
Yesterday Sega Europe announced the SEGA Mega Drive Classics Hub for Steam. Basically it’s a fancy emulator shell that lets you play Mega Drive games in a virtual room. It has the standard features you might expect officially released emulated games to have like save states and visual filters. But outside of that, it’ll have one very interesting sounding feature: Steam Workshop support.
According to Sega’s blog post, the Steam Workshop support is for “modified versions” of the Mega Drive games. You might think that this sounds a lot like they are letting people share ROM hacks, which would be huge news. And it turns out: they are! It was later confirmed on Twitter that you’ll be able to share “custom ROMs” of the games with other Steam users. So yeah, ROM hacks.
It’s no news that Sega is okay with people making and sharing ROM hacks. After all, they haven’t tried to stop us from letting people host them on this site. But to let people share them through an official channel like this has never been done before. More details on how Steam Workshop support will exactly work will be shared next week, but so far this all sounds very promising.
The SEGA Mega Drive Classics Hub will launch on April 28th, and will be released as a free update to the current Mega Drive emulator on Steam. It’ll be compatible with all of the Mega Drive games Sega are selling on Steam, and you’ll be able to make use of the hub if you already own any of them. This of course includes all of the Mega Drive Sonic games that are being sold on Steam.
It’s always great to see people on our forums get so far as to work on commercial games. One example of this is Poncho by Delve Entertainment, which was released today on PC and PlayStation 4. Matthew Weekes, a member of our forums who worked on Freedom Planet, was the lead pixel artist for this game. Aside from him, it was designed by Danny Hayes and Jack Odell, who also did the programming and music respectively.
The game’s main twist is it’s an open world where you can choose your own path, and switch between multiple layers like in Mutant Mudds. Originally the game was going to be funded through Kickstarter, but after the crowdfunding campaign failed they still managed get funding from publisher Rising Star Games.
You can buy it now on Steam for PC, or on PlayStation Network for PS4 for $14.99/€14.99/£10.99. The game will also be released on Wii U and PlayStation Vita sometime in the future.
So while Sonic Lost World coming to PC next month is neat, the news did not stop there. SEGA announced what could be considered bigger news in a single paragraph hidden within the press release: that it’s not the only game they’re porting to PC.
“We’re delighted to be able to bring Sonic Lost World to PC.” Said John Clark, VP of Commercial Publishing for SEGA Europe; “This is the latest in a string of high quality PC ports of past SEGA titles that we will be building on in the coming months and years.”
People have been requesting SEGA to port various games to PC including Vanquish, Resonance of Fate and Skies of Arcadia for quite some time now. It sounds like they may have been listening to those requests. Of course they could also be porting Sonic games like Sonic Colours or the underappreciated Sonic Unleashed.
They should really prioritize porting Jet Set Radio Future though.
[Source: Gamasutra]
The once Wii U exclusive Sonic Lost World is coming to PC through Steam. It’ll be released on November 2nd and you’ll get the excellent Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed if you pre-purchase it. The NiGHTS themed DLC will be included, though it seems doubtful that we’ll be getting the Nintendo-themed DLC as well. Not until it’s inevitably modded in anyway.
You can pre-purchase the game on Steam here for $29.99/£19.99/€27.99. The Steam description touts that it’ll have new features like 60 FPS gameplay (except it already was 60 FPS on Wii U… oops), HD resolution support, full gamepad and keyboard support, and all of the Steam features like achievements and cloud saving.
Really the most exciting potential feature is the one that isn’t listed: mods. Like with Sonic Generations, there’s the potential for various mods like character model swaps or improved graphics. So hopefully people will be making a decent amount of those.
Also Gene wanted me to plug his review of the original Wii U version, so you can read that here.
[Source: Gematsu]
Update: The price that was mentioned in the article used to be incorrect, and Sonic community manager RubyEclipse has since clarified what the actual pricing is supposed to be on our forums. This article has been changed to reflect that.
Jolly Roger has been doing a fantastic job getting stuff from the Sonic X-treme build that was found to work. Most recently he got the level editor used for the game to run on modern Windows and OpenGL, and he has uploaded a video recorded by Andrew75 demonstrating it running on Windows 7. It still needs a lot of work, as it currently has a lot of bugs and crashing issues, but it’s very impressive how fast Jolly managed to get this to work in this state.
Be sure to visit the thread about what’s being found in this prototype on our forums, as lots of interesting stuff is being found from this version of the game. It’s very exciting as it looks like we’re getting closer and closer to having a build of the game that runs well on modern computers, especially now that it looks like we’ll be able to make our own levels. You should also check out this recently recorded footage of the OpenGL port of the prototype that Jolly Roger is working on.