Classic Sonic PC Remasters

[Deep Dive Devin]

Genesis Sonic is pretty good, but you know what's even better? Widescreen. Remastered OSTs. Not dying to the spike bug.

 

It's well-known at this point that the Sonic Mania team got their start developing fan games and ROMhacks, but between that and Mania, they remastered Sonic 1, 2 and CD for mobile devices. They're pretty great, being built off the same engine as Mania, with better FPS, slightly more-reliable collision, and a whole host of tweaks and options to make the experience a little better (like fixing CD's dogshit spindash). Hell, they hunted down the original synthesizers for the games and recreated the entire OSTs in high quality.

 

Problem is, Sonic 1 and 2 remained mobile only up until today. A travesty, finally rectified. 

 

Fans have reverse-engineered the remastered ports and created a converter to play them on PC. You can play in widescreen with higher framerates, get the elemental shields, play as Knuckles, and even the prototype Hidden Palace level in Sonic 2.

 

You can even play them in ULTRA-WIDESCREEN.

 

 Now, legally speaking, the only way to run these is to buy the games from a mobile store, extract the file "data.rsdk" from the files, and drop it in the converter folder, but if for whatever reason you happen to possess the APKs of the games, you can find it in the "asset" folders for them, too.

 

CD got a Steam version, so I can just tell you to buy that. It's five bucks.

 

Now I know what you're thinking. Isn't there more? 

And yeah...sort of.

 

There's Sonic 3D Director's Cut, made by one of the original Traveller's Tales devs, but that's an Xdelta patch that you put on a regular ROM, and you basically just have to download the Steam emulated version for that legally. You don't get widescreen or remastered OSTs here. It does add things like a map screen, Super Sonic, better turning and such -- but it's still a platformer with isometric levels, where even a seasoned Sonic 06 veteran like myself has trouble landing jumps consistently.

 

But much more noteworthy is Sonic 3 - AIR (Angel Island Revisited). Because Sonic 3 is likely in copyright no man's land due to Michael Jackson's involvement on the soundtrack (something both legally dubious for SEGA and potential bad press because oof), we will likely never see a Thomley/Whitehead version of Sonic 3. User Eukaryot said "okay" and then did it anyway.  This is easily the most elaborative remaster of them all, with support for all sorts of mods and a LOT of customization. They even remastered the prototype soundtrack found in 2019's discovery, from before Michael Jackson even worked on it.

 

Frankly, I think the old version of Carnival Night sounds way nicer than the circus chorus of the final game (it also sounds way better than the 1997 PC version OST, which is the same but in godawful MIDI renditions)

 

Like with 3D Blast, the only really legal way to play this is to buy the Steam version, and sync the rom in your steamapps/common folder to the remastered exe, but I highly recommend it for this one. You can even turn the lives system off, which is good because lives systems are inherently bad.

 

With this, having a complete set of 1, 2, CD, 3K and Mania really brings the series together as a quintology. Maybe if we ever see engine ports of the Advance games, you could put those there too.

 

There's nothing missing...except for I guess Knuckles Chaotix? Which uh...

 

...oh...ew.

[kerdios]

Oh no! Not the cult of the way again?!

[centersolace]

Is that a Ken Penders issue? That looks like a Ken Penders issue.

[Deep Dive Devin]

14 hours ago, centersolace said:

Is that a Ken Penders issue? That looks like a Ken Penders issue.

I mean, it's one he wrote, but the weird creepy art in this case is from Chris Allan.

 

It's funny, for about the first half of this terrible arc the characters are drawn pretty normal (if in Allan's slightly jilted style), but the second it jumps into dumb Knuckles and Julie romantic tension, they suddenly get human proportions. It happens mid-issue, too. Mid-panel, even. Knuckles has the Sonic bean body in one panel, and is just unreasonably jacked in the next. Julie-Su gets a humanoid hourglass figure. Maybe Pendies asked for it in the script or something.