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saturn

Community, Game News

Point of View Sonic Xtreme Prototype Released


Fire up your Saturn consoles. The Point of View Sonic Xtreme prototype is ready to go.
By this point, if you’ve been hanging around the Sonic Scene for a fair bit of time, you know that unreleased games and prototypes are somewhat of a big deal. From Sonic 1 pre-alpha images, MegaDrive rom dumps of prototypes, and even some newer material with previously thought lost to time assets (see: Hidden Palace and its return to prominence in 2013 and the prototype Windy Valley in Sonic Adventure), it’s not uncommon around here.
So what’s so special about this prototype, released by Sonic Xtreme researcher JollyRoger? In its ill-fated development, Sonic Xtreme went through a lot of changes from a 32X game codenamed Sonic Mars to a Saturn game running on the 3D NiGHTS engine (in reality, a completely separate engine under the name Project Condor), to the more well known trippy fish-eye lens look. However, prior to the game being scrapped entirely, SEGA of America attempted one last ditch effort to realize the project by having the title exported to a company named Point of View.
What resulted is the demo video seen above. Forum user and prominent Sonic Xtreme research guru Andrew75 ascertained how this step may have transpired in the game’s development.

From what I gather, sometime in the middle of Sonic X-treme’s development, Sega outsourced the completion of Sonic X-treme to Point of View studios, without the knowledge of technical lead Ofer Alon or artist Chris Senn, who were working on the PC and Saturn engine and levels.
Point of View used assets from the original effort and developed a level converter to convert Sega Technical Institute’s engine levels into the binary format used by POV’s own engine, which had already been used before for several other games on a variety of
platforms, such as Saturn, Playstation, Nintendo 64, PC.

There is a whole lot more information available in the topic on the forum and through Senn’s website. However, for those of you that can play burned Saturn games (tricky stuff. Don’t try it at home) or have access to play it through certain other means, you can nab the iso right here with mirror links in the topic.

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SEGA Channel Retro: Sonic Birthday Celebration


Come join our live SEGA Channel Retro stream as we celebrate Sonic’s birthday the only way we know how! Come check out Sonic games and more on stream.
Now that the stream has concluded, jump to any point you’d like from our initial stream, and be sure to stay tuned this week for more Sonic games streamed live on SEGA Channel Retro. Videos are up on YouTube and on Twitch.
Uncut Stream [Twitch]
Sonic Jam (With Sonic 3 Easy Mode) [YouTube] [Twitch]
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Retro Engine [YouTube] [Twitch]
Sonic Adventure (Sonic’s Story) [YouTube] [Twitch]

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Retro Stream – Sega Heritage Collection

Watch live video from vidyaretro on www.twitch.tv

Later today the Retro crew are going to be hosting a Sega Heritage Collection showcase. We’ve been in contact with Ben K. as to when we can show the games off, and he was kind to let us know that we can go ahead and show off all three games as of this week.

We’ll be taking a look at Nights into Dreams, Jet Set Radio and Sonic Adventure 2. You can expect our fond recollections of all three games and an exploration of each game’s features before their release date. Well, except for Jet Set Radio, you can get that now on Playstation Network, Xbox Live Arcade and Steam. But if you’re still on the fence about any of these titles, be sure to check out our livestream later today at 4PM. You can also check back here for a direct link to the feed as well.