SAGE makes its triumphant return on…
For the uninitiated, there’s a whole dang page on the Sonic Retro Wiki with SAGE’s history here! Hit the jump for more information, including this year’s submission guidelines! Make sure to give them a thorough read, as a lot has changed this year!
Woah hey wait what? E3 is only a week away? Dang man, that’s pretty cool. For those of you who will be in the area for the biggest video game event on the planet (or are still going to be around post a certain other convention from the day prior…) join us for food, drinks, and games over at Dave and Buster’s in Hollywood, CA the Monday before the big show, June 12th! We’ll be meeting there around 5pm Pacific (that’s UTC−8 for any of you Brits that might want to come!) and will likely close it out at midnight, should folks be willing to stay out that late. Feel free to pop in, have a few drinks, grab some grub, and try the completely ridiculous Mario and Sonic arcade game with us. Hope to see you there!
Just a heads up: There’s a lot of Dave and Buster’s locations in the Los Angeles area, make sure you’re headed to the one in Hollywood, California specifically!
Shoutout to Tracker TD for the awesome art!
It’s rare that a Sonic fan game gets fully released. Many are often cancelled or often stay in development hell after releasing one or two demos. But for once one of those games managed to get out of said development hell and be released as a full fledged game.
Sonic Time Twisted, created by Overbound Game Studio, has finally been released after being twelve years in development. The fan game features 28 acts across 8 zones, time travel, new special stages, and a soundtrack that’s headed up by Hinchy.
The full game can be downloaded on Overbound’s site, and the soundtrack can be found here. You can also find the game’s previous demo releases on our wiki.
We can finally show the first trailer of Big’s Big Fishing Adventure 3, featuring the voice of Mike Pollock! This trailer, inspired by Sonic Adventure‘s Japanese commercials, teases Dr. Eggman’s role in the game. It also shows the Big-Hazard Battle mini-game in action for the first time. This is the first in a series of trailers that will showcase the game’s various characters.
Big’s Big Fishing Adventure 3 is a fan-made visual novel starring Big the Cat featuring various mini-games. It will show what the purple feline was up to during the events of Sonic Adventure 2, revealing why he was hanging around in the game’s stages. It is also partially being developed by Sonic Retro staff.
For more news and updates on the game you can follow the game on Twitter.
With the pagies in cagies and Umbra Witches returning from slumber, today’s releases on Steam includes a platformer from the development team behind Sonic fan games such as Sonic After the Sequel.
After a successful kickstarter campaign and given the green light on Steam, Spark the Electric Jester comes out on Steam reliving the glory days of 16-bit platformers fusing together gameplay elements of Sonic the Hedgehog and the Kirby series. Spark comes with dozens of Steam features including trading cards, achievements and Steam cloud support.
Spark the electric jester is an action/platformer video game heavily based on best classics from the 16-bit era from both sides of the aisle.
You play as Spark, an electric jester frustrated by the loss of his job! On one beautiful day, robots decided to take over the world. Seeing as Spark’s job was taken by a robot, he decided this was the perfect opportunity for his revenge! Spark will have to travel through the world and be engulfed in high-speed thrills and tons of action against the robots and the one who has taken his job.
Check out the Steam sale page for the game here. Heck, buy copies for your friends and support your community! I’d say Spark deserves as much spotlight as games like Sonic Mania, Freedom Planet and Major Magnet.
[Source: Steam]
This Sunday at 8PM GMT (3PM Central), we’ll be playing games together with house rules. I’m hosting another Retro Community Day on SEGA Channel Retro. The channel reached over 1,000 subscribers on YouTube and over 400 subscribers on Twitch! To celebrate this, we’re going to be showcasing Sonic Bash, a hack where two players compete to defeat bosses by landing the most hits. Joining me (Bartman) on the horn is Neo Hazard as well as Red Hot Sonic the author of the hack.
You will need to download the hack along with Kega Fusion to get yourself ready for Sunday. Luckily you can find this from the hack’s old entry page from the 2016 Sonic Hacking Contest. This also features instructions on how to set up Kega Fusion for netplay which will be useful on Sunday. This is going to work differently since there’s no dedicated online infrastructure or friend list to work with, so we’re going to make use of the Sonic Retro Discord channel to help us out. Fill out this form here with your Discord handle and join the Sonic Retro Discord here so that we can keep track of you. Do this before 7:30 PM GMT Sunday to ensure your chance to play with us. (You can use that time to meet with us!)
We’ll have more information on how you’ll be able to play with us this Sunday at 8PM GMT. (3PM Central) But here’s a checklist to make sure you can join the celebration.
Note about the Sonic Retro Discord: A bot is in place that allows us to see who joins in. You will need to wait for approval before you can post messages in the Discord channel. Keep in mind that it’s a matter of when mods are around to approve you. All participants will be approved before the community day starts!
Those looking forward to the Unleashed Project will be disheartened to hear that the project is no more. In a statement released by the Project’s head, S0LV0, she’s stated that it was time to call it quits. From the Twitlonger post:
So, here it is. I can’t begin to express how sorry I am about this, but I’m cancelling Unleashed Project 2.0. For a long time I was really passionate about it, and I felt I had something special to share with people by working on it, but that passion is gone. I know of no one I could pass the workload onto, nor do I plan to release my “completed” work as none of it is fully polished. I’m sincerely sorry to those who were looking forward to it, but I hope you’ll understand by this far into my post that it was extremely unhealthy for me.
S0LV0 goes on to talk about what she’ll be doing from this point and more in her full Twitlonger post which can be read here. For those holding onto hope, S0LV0 tweeted that DarioFF, the person in charge of the Unleashed Project prior to her, may be interested in taking the project over. We at Retro wish S0LV0 all the best in what she does and look forward to her projects in the future.
This sucks. CloudFlare screwed up, and this affects more than Sonic Retro, SEGAbits and the rest of our family of websites. A coding flaw has allowed their edge servers to generate a buffer containing sensitive data which means a data compromise, and a big one at that. Our websites use CloudFlare’s services.
The security flaw has been resolved on their end with the assistance of a security researcher at Google’s Project Labs. However this affects several major websites including Reddit, OkCupid, Uber and several others that use their service. Read more about the issue on CloudFlare’s blog.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
[Source: CloudFlare]
We’re already talking about Hacking Contest in 2017? You bet! The Sonic Hacking Contest’s 15th anniversary is upon us all and they need your help in a big way! The early report brings about rule changes and new trophies are being introduced in next year’s contest.
New rules are set to enact new “quality control” measures for entries to give a bigger focus on the technical achievement for entries with a lower focus on referential humor. New trophies are being made to address entries made for other platforms such as entries for handheld platforms with the Advance Trophy, 8-bit hacks with the Crystal Egg Trophy as well as introducing new trophies to be voted on by the community at large.
You can read up on how you can get your entries ready by reading Spanner’s post on the forums that details the rule changes, trophy guidelines and more. But when does the contest start? You have nearly a whole year before the deadline which is set for Sunday the 8th of October. The contest week then goes between the 6th of November to the 12th. There is plenty of time before then, but don’t let it sneak up on you before you know it!
[Source: Spanner on Sonic Retro’s Forums]
