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Fan Works, Uncategorized

“Not Enough Rings” Kickstarter Nears Time Over, Speed Shoes Required

photo-mainI’m not usually one to talk about Kickstarters, let alone go ahead and plug them. But seeing as this is a Sonic the Hedgehog website, when a Kickstart about a Sonic shows up, it’s hard not to mention it. What I’m speaking of is Veronica Vera’s Not Enough Rings, a printed collection of the webcomic by the same name. The premise is each strip focuses on a single act from the four classic Mega Drive games, offering a humorous spin on what lays in store for our hedgehog hero. When the Kick began, it gained plenty of coverage across the usual places including our very best friends at SEGAbits. But! The entire campaign is in its final hours, and once its over, who knows if you’ll be able to get it without spending an absurd amount of money on eBay?

Since it has reached its goal, there’s no fear of it not hitting your shelves in the near future. But for those who get very excited about the color blue, a last minute incentive has been included. If the whole thing reaches fifteen grand, the pages of the book will have blue painted edges. Exciting, no?

There’s also the usual “hey, pledge more and get other things to satisfy your cravings” type deals, but that’s best explained on the page itself. Click here to journey to the Kick, and if it seems like your type of thing, go ahead and order it. The book is only twenty five dollars. Heck, that’s like…five coffees if you like crazy things at Starbucks! And you can still call yourself a hipster.

Community, Fan Works, Hacking

Sonic Hacking Contest 2013 Now Open for Registration

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Rev up your disassemblies, it’s that time of the year where aspiring Sonic game hackers get their chance to show off new game ideas once more. Registration for the 2013 Sonic Hacking Contest is now open. In the past, the contest has seen magnificent entries such as the highly-praised Sonic Megamix or the blistering fast (and brutally difficult) Sonic Boom.

Novice hackers of course shouldn’t be so intimidated to enter after seeing names like those, since all it takes is a little creativity to strike gold. Robotnik’s Revenge, anyone?

This year is promised to be the biggest year for the contest according to contest judge SuperEgg.

Yes folks, this year all the stops have been pulled, and media coverage wasn’t an exception. For years, this contest had been only covered by MegaGWolf, but this year is going to be different. Through many hours of research and development, the judges realized that the need to bring attention to this community gem has been lacking, and something needed to be done about it.

I took the initiative and invited one of the ever popularly growing YouTube reveiwer, SomeCallMeJohnny, to play with us during this contest. He will be making a series of videos reviewing the hacks in the contest. Another incentive to make sure your hacks are tip top shape for contest, eh?

Johnny is a cool guy, so be nice. No promises that he won’t bite, cause you never know, the evil Sonic hat could easily possess him again……

With more eyes on the contest than ever before, it’s time to see what all the hackers out there, talented or otherwise, can really do. To submit an entry, vote and comment, you must have a Sonic Retro OR a Sonic Stuff Research Group account that has gone through the respective site’s trial period. Exceptions will be considered, so don’t let this be a deterrent.

Submissions must be done through the contest’s website, located here.

Community, Fan Works, Music

Sonic After the Sequel Releases Today

Another fine release by Lake Feperd (and his crew of musical co-horts) today as Sonic After the Sequel which is a fan-made sequel to Sonic Before the Sequel which was a prequel to Sonic the Hedgehog 2.  You can visit this link here to grab the game for yourself. Pretty impressive considering the previous release was only a year ago, yet retains its own unique level themes, branching paths and more. In addition, Lake Feperd has announced a few months ago that he is working on a new Sonic fan game titled Sonic Chrono Adventure which takes inspiration from other titles such as Sonic CD and involves time travel and more open world gameplay.

But don’t get ahead of yourself, check out After the Sequel today! While you’re waiting, you can view the release trailer shown above.

Community, Fan Works, Hacking, Humor

Fan-Game Frenzy: Sonic Doom II – Bots on Mobius


Watch live video from vidyaretro on TwitchTV

Have you subscribed to our Twitch channel? We’ve been doing some streams to mess about while we prepare for the next Retro Community Day (Which is likely to happen soon!) When you subscribe, you’ll learn about when we do some unannounced streams. (That is, what we don’t announce on the front page.)

Last Friday, me and the Retro crew sat through the precursor of Sonic Robo Blast 2; Sonic Doom 2 – Bots on Mobius, a total conversion of Doom II: Hell on Earth that attempts to bring the aesthetics of the Sonic universe with guns. Well, sort of. We play through the mod to it’s completion, for better or worse as I jog my memory of this mod from over 10 years ago. Sonic fan games during the 90’s were certainly something else and somehow, I spent some time of my youth playing this. Probably more than I should have.

If you want to play the mod for yourself, SSNTails recently updated the mod to be compatible with zDoom and you can find it here.

Fan Works, Hacking

Sonic Winter Adventures Gets First Public Release

Sonic 1 hacks are a dime-a-dozen these days. This makes getting excited about them a little difficult if nothing more than a few palettes are edited and zones are sloppily renamed to fit their new color schemes. That said, it’s never a dull day when someone steps up and delivers a new Sonic 1 experience with new boss enemies, moves for Sonic, and more.

Enter Russian Sonic hacker vladikcomper and his project Sonic Winter Adventures. In similar stead to Sonic 1 Megamix, Adventures enables Sonic to enable the full power of blast processing  with the addition of light speed dash, super peel out, the spin dash, and even the homing attack. Let’s give the purists a little time to seethe. … All right then!

While the level variety isn’t very boastful, vladikcomper laments, the amount of work put in so far is a very commendable effort and definitely worth playing though. Some of his bosses make specific use of Sonic’s new age moves meaning you can’t just throw Sonic’s body into Eggman eight times and waltz over to the Egg Prisonpod so easily.

So what are you waiting for? Download this bad boy and give it a spin yourself! And don’t think that beating the game means it’s over. vladik teases that more playthroughs unlock more things.

[Official Sonic Winter Adventure Thread]

Community, Fan Works, Game News, Hacking, Music

Sonic Generations: Unleashed Project Mod Released

unleashedproject-logo

We first reported on the Unleashed Project over a year ago, when Sonic Retro community members (and all-around beautiful people) Dario FF, Twilightzoney, and Chimera revealed the earliest footage of their experiments with porting stages from Sonic Unleashed into the PC version of Sonic Generations. Today, thanks to the incredible efforts of Dario and his team, they’ve released the first completed version of the project, including all eight major daytime stages from the original Unleashed ported to Generations, along with a redesigned hub world and reworked level progression.

Now you can play through all of the best parts of Unleashed without having to endure the suffering caused by Werehog fatigue and medal-hunting. Plus, you can enjoy the beautiful art direction of each stage in full 1080p at 60 frames per second (provided your computer can handle it – my Phenom II X4 cries during Jungle Joyride), and many of the game’s lower-resolution textures have been recreated in higher quality so you can get the most out of your PC’s graphics card. Of course, the stages also benefit from improvements and changes Generations made over its predecessor, such as tighter controls and the addition of customizable skills.

Be sure to check out the trailer after the break, complete with an orgasmic remix of the Unleashed final boss theme by Retro musician Falk, known for his work on fan games such as Sonic Before the Sequel and After the Sequel (and who also did the hub world remixes of the Unleashed stage themes for this project). You should also head to the project’s ModDB page, where you can find links to download the mod for yourself. Finally, a tremendous thanks to the Unleashed Project team for all the hard work they’ve put in over the past year to get this polished up and ready for release. This project is a stellar example of the kind of awesome stuff we love to see from the Retro community.

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Community, Hacking, Sega Retro

Aliens: Colonial Marines Polished Up By Fans

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When it comes to games involving Sega in some capacity, it almost seems like the game itself isn’t the only thing players are paying for, but a whole new meta-game called, “Let’s improve the game through hacking through the game’s data.”

This new style of gameplay, which from here on we’ll call Tactical Debugging Action/Adventure™, has already drawn some talented programmers to sift through the game’s code on the PC version in an effort to enhance the game graphically and could potentially lead to repairing other issues such as enemy A.I. and other parameters.

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Community, Fan Works, Game News, Music, Sega Retro, Site News

Tuesday Links – “Those Darn Aliens!” Edition

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Okay, even I wasn’t sure of what would happen on the release of Aliens: Colonial Marines when I wrote my initial preview of the game. If you’re a PC user, you could look over some fixes and patches a dedicated community is looking into. A real unfortunate turn out for a game that’s been in development for over six years. Either way, it’s a Monday Tuesday which we put off for a week, but word is still mum in the world of video games, which will change shortly. Until then, here are a few things that are worth your attention.

Retro News

  • User reassembler has ported Yu Suzuki’s classic arcade title Outrun to C++ under the name… [Cannonball]
  • User Hezman introduces a new camera system in Sonic Classic 2. [Youtube]
  • Nicalis has picked up The 90’s Arcade Racer to publish on Wii U. [Computer & Video Games]
  • GeneHF mixes a Transformed/Sonic R mash-up of Back in Time. [Jammin’]
  • David also continues to take you Back in Time…or forward in time to Mobius 25 Years Later with part 16! [Ken Penders]

Colonial Marines & SEGA News

  • A user on Reddit claims to be a tester for the game and gives a lowdown on some of the shadier things to happen during the game’s development. Though at this time, take it with a grain of salt. [VG247]
  • Colonial Marines pays homage to a popular Sega franchise [Youtube]
  • We did tell you the PC version of Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed  is out now, right? [Steam]
  • Well there are a few things broke with it, and Steve Lycett needs your help testing the new fixes. [Steam]
  • Also the Outrun Bay track with Metal Sonic will be available for PC users tomorrow for purchase […oh yeah, Steam]
  • We also told you that the 3DS version of Transformed is out too? [SEGA Blog]
  • SEGA of Japan produces a line of laptops featuring designs based on their console hardware [Joystiq]

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Fan Works, Music

Sunday Jams: Green Hill, Live and In Person

Hey look, it’s Sunday. What do you do on a Sunday? You listen to the twelve billionth remix of the Green Hill Zone. But that’s OK, because this one sounds super nice.

Performed by the YouTube band Tetrimino, their story is a familiar one: four people who have never met each other use the power of the Internet to play music together. Video game music, at that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The individual members have been bouncing about on the video site for a while, but only recently have decided to team up, this rendition of the Green Hill Zone being only their second track together. Their previous video was a Chrono Trigger medley, which you can listen to here.

So yeah, give it a listen. You can never get enough live music, and those solos? Just proves you can still listen to this song after Generations and not get sick of it.

Well, unless you are.