Sonic Unleashed is seen as one of the biggest 3D entries in the history of Sonic. Whether you like the werehog or not, it brought a massive overhaul to the game design philosophy of Sonic working in the third dimension. The beautiful environments based on real-life locations, fast gameplay and a unique lighting engine all housed under the “Hedgehog Engine” helped achieve a major milestone for fast-paced 3D platformers. Fast forward towards the end of the downer year that is 2016, it has brought us one thing that can shed some meaningful insight on the development of Sonic Unleashed; the release of an Xbox 360 preview build.
At least, the first disk.
Forum user N!NJA released the build two days ago and already there has been several discoveries thanks to the efforts of others data mining information, uploading screenshots, videos and more. In addition the build also comes with debugging tools that highlights NPC and enemy behavior status, camera direction and gameplay control modifiers. While you can run the build on a modified Xbox 360 console, it is recommended to use a dev kit as you may run into crashes forcing you to shut down the console.
Some of the notable differences include…
- 60fps! …but not very stable, lots of screen tearing and drops
- Unused level and object layouts
- Placeholder graphics
- Old menu system seen in early E3 previews
- Old GUI, especially for the Sonic the Werehog stages
- …and more!
N!NJA promises to release builds for other Sonic titles in the near future. If you want a quick look at the preview build, hit the jump to check out some links! Stay up to date with the discoveries thread to see what all has been unearthed from the preview build thus far or take a look at the build for yourself in the discussion thread.
[Source: Sonic Retro Forums]
From the Forums
- Discussion Thread (Download the build here here)
- Discoveries Thread
N!NJA’s Screenshot Gallery
Videos
2 Comments
A few other prototypes were released as well:
* Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (2 builds): http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=36216
* Sonic and the Black Knight: http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=36215
These are Wii prototypes dumped from RVT-R discs, so they won’t work on Dolphin or via USB loaders as-is. I posted a patch for the M&S 2010 builds to enable use on hardware (linked in the original thread). For Dolphin, I submitted a (not yet merged) pull request that adds the RVT-R key. The patch works with Dolphin as well, so that can be used in the meantime.
I tried making a similar patch for Black Knight, but it seems the H3 table is corrupt (bad dump?), so it won’t boot unless I rebuild the entire image.
Some of the RVT-R’s were marked up when I got them, It’s possible like you said the Black Knight dump was bad due to that.
I’m leaving today for the weekend but when back I should be getting my RVT-R dumping drive back meaning I’ll do a redump. If it works I’ll change the link and make a reply in thread.
Thanks for the work on making M&S work on retail. Also, It seems that M&S London 2012 might be final. Will look more into this when I get home.
Hoping to get footage over the weekend of a Wii Unleashed Beta and possibly an alpha build of another Sonic game. Won’t know more till I get back though as the guys not 100% on selling.