#retro engine

I mean you're describing the heart of why a lot of Sonic fans aren't happy with Sonic Team's attempts to replicate Classic Sonic's "feel", and its because they never get it right. He feels too stiff, too heavy, too something and it spoils the whole thing. There was a really magical balance being struck by the Genesis games, and only Sonic Mania seemed to understand that (and Sonic Superstars, because under the hood it's just running Retro Engine for player physics).

In Colors, Sonic feels both heavy and sticky when they force you to do 2D platforming segments. He feels too light in Sonic Generations. You don't have enough air control in Sonic Forces, on top of being stiff and heavy. In a number of these games, they expect you to compensate a lot with the double jump (Colors, Lost World, Frontiers).

A Korean games board rating for "Sonic Origins Plus" was leaked a few weeks ago. What could that be about? Let's talk about it.

In a tweet that went up a few hours ago, Headcannon confirmed that they have contributed to the upcoming new content for Sonic Origins Plus. Specifically, members of their team have worked on the sprites for Amy Rose, and for Knuckles’ campaign in Sonic CD.

Specifically, Andy A-Start and DashPadSPD worked on the design and data management specifically. In addition to the new sprites, Headcannon also supplied some additional enhancements and updates, which will presumably come in a future patch. Headcannon finished their twitter thread by thanking SEGA for their openness to the developer’s feedback and suggestions, and they appreciate the level of trust SEGA put in them.

Headcannon was responsible for bringing Sonic 3 & Knuckles to the Retro Engine. They later stated that they were unhappy with the final product.

Generally speaking I do not take requests because I feel like part of what makes "The Definitive Way to Play" special is that these are usually mods I have field tested over a long period of time because I use them with games I want to play.

Making "Definitive Way to Play" for games outside of that sphere of influence potentially introduces scenarios where I'm telling people about things I'm not intimately aware of front to back, and currently that makes me uncomfortable.

That being said, "The Definitive Way to Play Sonic CD" is actually something that very briefly crossed my mind as something I could do some day. There is a mod that implements Sonic: Time Twisted's time travel mechanics. Which is to say, as long as you are running remotely fast and touch a past/future sign, you instantly warp to that time zone.

The issue with that is I think it's tricky to do a video like that. You mention there's nothing like Sonic 1 Forever, and that's definitely true. I'm not going to shoutout mods for a version of the game you can't actually buy anymore.

Something is in the works called Cosmic, which is basically a top-to-bottom rewrite of Retro Engine v3 (what the 2011 Sonic CD is made in), but it's still a work-in-progress and I'm not sure it's compatible with any of the mods that I'd want to try out and recommend.

There's a new video review! After the last Sonic Origins video, I figured I needed to follow through with a proper video review, solidifying my thoughts about the final product.

Let's say these are the Retro Engine versions of these games. So they go in, update the source to run on the target platforms (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox SX, Switch) which may or may not be trivial, but probably not that difficult.

Within a few weeks, maybe a couple months, you have workable modern versions of Sonic 1, 2, and CD.

But there's no Retro Engine version of Sonic 3. Taxman and Stealth developed a pitch version, but I'm willing to bet that was just Angel Island and maybe one of the Blue Spheres stages.

That leaves the other, what, 13 levels? 14 levels? Plus split screen multiplayer?

So what does that entail, exactly. Assuming this is actually Retro Engine, you can't just throw a ROM in to an emulator and have everything work perfectly. This means meticulously reverse-engineering badnik behavior, how objects work, etc.

Now you could do that just by eyeballing things -- something I liked to do when I was developing Sonic fan games was to capture footage of the game being played and watch it back in slow motion in order to understand the subtle nuances of how things worked. Like, counting the frames between each new air bubble in an underwater stage, how many dust cloud sprites Sonic generates when he skids, things like that. Real deep nuts-and-bolts type stuff.

But there will always be little things that you miss. Obscure functions that just never come up. You may get it 85% right, but there will always be that 15%.

The other option would be to decompile the source code. This is long, and tedious, and takes an extremely tech-oriented person to do it, but Sonic Retro has a literal encyclopedia about this topic so it's not impossible to do, just slow. By breaking Sonic 3 back down in to raw source code, its easier to port those functions and have them work identically (this is probably what Stealth helped Taxman with for Sonic 1, 2, and CD).

Though decompiling is slower, neither option is going to be especially fast. They would be effectively rebuilding one of the largest Sonic games ever made from scratch. That's almost as much work as making a brand new game.

And that's assuming they don't put in any bonus features. What if they expand multiplayer so that you get Sonic 2 style multiplayer in all three games? What if they redraw Sonic 3's multiplayer to be full screen? If they're adding online play of any kind then that is a whole different kettle of fish.

And on top of that, there are rumors that the team working on Sonic Origins is pretty small. Under ten people, maybe even under five people.

Sega never openly advertised the involvement of Dimps until the end credits of the Sonic Advance games, too.

These are Sonic Team games first and foremost, and Sega is doing a lot of legwork themselves here. The way Stealth makes it sound, he only directly worked on the Sonic 3 conversion for this, meaning Sega handled all of the other Retro Engine stuff themselves (porting, mirror mode, mission mode, etc.).

It's pretty clear Evening Star has moved on. They're staffing up for an original game.

Before Sonic Mania came out, Aaron Webber was very careful to stress that Sonic Mania wasn't something that was easy to pull off. Presumably he didn't want thousands of Sonic fans beating down his door begging him to let them make official Sonic games.

But the way he told it, Sonic Mania was the result of years of trust building to make sure that the team could deliver on a product. For some of those guys, that was the biggest, most professional gig they'd ever had. That was their big break. For Sega, it looked like a gamble. They aren't just going to hand the keys to the franchise to anyone. There's a very careful, slow process of evaluation there.

(Of course, then you hear things like how Sega of Japan straight up forgot who Christian Whitehead even was between projects, and I'm not so sure I fully buy in to Aaron's "careful, slow process of evaluation." Then again, looking now, I can't find a source on Whitehead saying Sega forgot who he was, so I guess let's forget about that for now.)

My point here is that Sonic Mania was probably a one-time fluke. As a project, it's difficult to top. It was exhaustively comprehensive. It is, far and away, the biggest, longest 2D Sonic game ever made, almost to a fault.

I've said it before but you kind of can't do that a second time. You can't just make "Sonic Mania Again, but now there's even more of it." There was almost too much of it last time.

Or rather, you can do that, but you gotta wait a really long time. Like how there's only one Mario Kart game every 6-8 years. You gotta let the fandom wring every single itty bitty last drop out of the game. They gotta be dying for more. Otherwise you risk over-saturating the market and killing all of your appeal on such a simple idea.