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Retro Stream at 4PM Central Featuring the Unleashed-to-Generations Mod

Watch live video from vidyaretro on www.twitch.tv

We’ve got one more surprise stream for you all before the end of the new year. We will be joined by Chimera of the Unleashed to Generations conversion team checking out one of the levels and will be able to take your questions.

Check back at 4PM Central (That’s less than an hour if you’re just reading this!) and come join us!

UPDATE: The stream is over, if you missed it you can still watch it archived (cut into lots of parts due to connection problems) here on our Twitch channel.

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Fan Works, Hacking

The Many Faces of Sonic Generations Modding

A while back, you’ll remember we made a post showing how a small group of fans on our forums were tearing into the very fabric of the PC version of Sonic Generations to recreate the daytime stages of Sonic Unleashed within the game. On last check, they had managed to get the Hedgehog Engine’s Global Illumination Ambiance working, a rather impressive task of its own right. So how are things coming along now?

Quite fantastically, if these three projects all based off Generations are anything to go by.

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Fan Works, Hacking

Windmill Isle Act 1 Released for Sonic Generations PC

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.

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Fan Works, Hacking, Humor

Character Swaps Aren’t Going to Get Much Better Than This

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.

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Fan Works, Hacking

Sonic Generations Model Swapping Fun

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.

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Game News, Hacking

Check Out These Unleashed Levels in Sonic Generations PC

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.

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Fan Works, Hacking

Sonic Megamix Still In DevelopmentSonic Megamix Sigue Estando En Desarrollo

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.

Ha habido ciertos rumores y especulaciones sobre el popular rom hack Sonic Megamix de que supuestamente iba a ser cancelado por causas ocurridas en eventos recientes, el líder de Team Megamix, Stealth, ha abierto un nuevo hilo de discusión sobre el juego, y ha notificado una declaración acerca de su progreso.

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Hacking, Miscellaneous

Appealing to the Most Players in a Post-Generations World

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?

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Hacking, Miscellaneous, Site News

Midweek Links: We iz teh gratis Edition

(Thanks to pkmnexplorer for this week’s “Sonic & Luigi” image, found in a recent Sears catalog.)

 

Sonic Retro News

  • MarkeyJester released a small hack this week ’cause he iz teh gratis. The thing seems like a joke hack but is pretty great. Check it out! [ Pana Der Hejhog ]
  • Mercury wrote an extensive piece on reoccuring themes in Masato Nakamura’s compositions for Sonic 1 and 2 and wound up finding some interesting similarities between the Sonic 1 Special Stage theme and Sonic 2‘s unused track 10 music. It’s a longer read, but worth it for fans of the series’ earliest music. [ A Musical Mystery Still Unsolved ]
  • Popular music porting software xm4smps received an update to work with XMs created on OpenMPT 1.19+; as a bonus, some of the features which were in development are also shown in this build. [ xm4smps 4.1 ‘beta’ ]
  • The Japanese Sonic Generations website was updated this week, but not before learning about some exotic new character when we were promised no more! [ Some fox named Milse ]
  • I’m under the impression that some of our readers believe that friendship is magic or something. I’m not really sure what it has to do with Sonic the Hedgehog, or why our member’s-only lounge has a huge thread about ponies, but of course someone somewhere has to combine these two fandoms. [ My Little Mega Drive ]

Sega/Sonic News

  • Sonic Generations Collector’s Edition was announced last week for European and Australian audiences, but this has left other audiences without a way to purchase the box set. Right now, the best option for North and South American audiences is to go through Amazon UK, who is currently charging 85GBP for a preorder on the game and approximately 10GBP for airmail shipping and customs charges (if applicable for your country.) Keep in mind that this may not be the best deal, but it is the best of what has been announced so far and given the limited run of Collector’s Edition sets, you may want to preorder now. [ Sonic Generations: Collector’s Edition for 360 / Sonic Generations: Collector’s Edition for PS3 ]
  • Australian chain GAME is holding a charity auction of games from the Sonic franchise before Sonic Generations‘ release. The kicker? Their presenter, Ed, doesn’t have the 45 games needed to hold a complete auction. If you’re willing to donate a copy, you can get a 50AUD voucher for GAME and a free copy of Generations. [ GAME Australia Embarks on the Amazing Sonic Quest ]
  • I heard some sass earlier this week that the just-announced Rhythm Thief would simply be a rip-off of Elite Beat Agents and nothing worth writing home about. Sassers? You’re wrong, and these screenshots and video prove otherwise. [ Nintendo 3DS Conference 2011 ]
  • SEGAbits celebrates the 12th anniversary of the Dreamcast this week with a series of articles culminating with a podcast full of DC nostalgia. [ Dreamcast 12th Anniversary ]

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