SAGE 10: Review Slew #1

The first five games – and our first casualty.

Wouldn’t you know it – it’s the tenth anniversary of the Sonic Amateur Games Expo! I’m extremely proud that something I created has endured this long, even though I haven’t really had a hand in organizing the event since about 2003. The web design this year is absolutely gorgeous, and already, some of the events within SAGE have proven to be amazing – last night’s dramatic fanfic reading featuring special guest LittleKuriboh, for example. And here I am, back for a third year in a row, with another shotgun blast of SAGE fangame reviews straight to your face.

Sonic 1: The Retro Channel
Cinossu has always done some very interesting things in the time I have known him. His Hapi-san game, Chao Online, Sonic 1 Extended Edition, so on and so forth – but if there’s one bummer, its that he never seems to follow through, or at least, not terribly quickly. This is, after all, a hobby for most of us, so it’s understandable when somebody only works on these things when they feel like it, but there are so many cool ideas at play in his projects that a ravenous desire to see the finished product eventually forms that becomes difficult to shake. This year brings us the Retro Channel: A beautiful merger between emulator, ROM hack, and database. A plugin for Gerbil’s branch of the Gens emulator talks to a Sonic ROM hack that allows the two to share data between the “Retro Channel”, enabling real-time leaderboard statistics, achievements, and a handful of other fun stuff, right from within the game. Though still in beta, what is currently functional right now is already impressive enough. This could be the start of something wonderful.

Sonic Zeta Overdrive
Last year I spoke of Sonic Zeta Overdrive as an example of how disconnected I am from the ROM hacking “scene”. It was a textbook hack: funky new color palettes for everything, some arguably annoying stage redesigns, and not much else. It’s back again this year, and has seen a welcome degree of improvement. There is an increased level of level-designing polish here, and just in writing this review, I played for close to an hour. It’s still a little rough around the edges, though: not all levels have been modified, some of the new color palettes make me feel like I’m going colorblind, and there are a few minor collision detection/physics issues that I encountered. Still, it’s hard to deny that Zeta Overdrive is showing far more promise than it did last year. Here’s hoping the improvements don’t stop here.

Metal Gear Solid: Fight of the Metal Gears
You may have heard of Squirrelking before – he’s known for writing some of the most unintentionally hilarious fanfiction ever. His primary claim to fame was Half-Life: Full Life Consequences, which followed the poorly-written exploits of Gordon Freeman’s brother, John Freeman. Many people have made “dramatic readings” of his work, but courtesy of “The Snake Soup”, we have our first fangame based on his work – the equally popular Fight of the Metal Gears. FotMG puts you in the shoes of Solid Snake’s brother, Jake Snake, as he… well, fights Metal Gears, I guess. Levels are interspersed with fully-voiced, motion-comic-style cutscenes that mimick the style of the recently-released Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, which are great – except that the levels inbetween these cutscenes… aren’t so great. Stealth seems difficult if not impossible, ammo is too scarce for the amount of enemies you face, and in general, the camera seems a little too zoomed up on the action to see what’s ahead. It’s one thing when you base your game on something that is “so bad it’s funny”, but pulling that sort of concept off gameplay-wise is extremely difficult to do. Whether intentionally bad or not, Fight of the Metal Gears is simply difficult to play – which is a shame; I dig just about everything else this game does, presentation-wise.

Sonic 2: Retro Remix
There was a ROM hack, years ago, called Sonic: Pixel Perfect. Pixel Perfect showed enormous promise; it featured beautiful graphics, level design almost on par with Sega’s own work, and an interesting day/night cycle. Unfortunately, the team behind Pixel Perfect eventually parted ways – some of which have gone on to make Retro Remix. At its core, Retro Remix feels as thought Thorn and DNXDelta really wanted to make a Sonic Advance 2 hack, but had to settle for Sonic the Hedgehog 2, instead, as Retro Remix borrows heavily from some of Sonic’s more modern outings. Homing attacks, wall jumps, and extreme speed is the name of the game here. There are two primary modes to choose from: Adventure Mode and Classic Mode. Adventure Mode borrows from more contemporary 3D platformers, with hub worlds and shiny collectibles used to unlock new areas. Classic Mode is your standard, level-by-level Sonic game, for those who don’t want to deal with hubs and the like. I wouldn’t blame you, either: collecting the necessary emeralds to access the next area is not terribly easy. In the time I spent playing around in Adventure Mode, I cleared six levels and only found three emeralds out of a possible thirty. And, much like the games many of its mechanics are lifted from, Retro Remix can be frustrating, thanks to heavy scripting and the ability to move too fast to see where you’re going. Regardless, the size and depth of the levels on offer here is certainly very impressive, and though it lacks the highly polished simplicity of Pixel Perfect, areas are designed very, very well. Next to Cinossu’s Retro Channel, Remix is one of the stand-out hacks of SAGE 2010. If you like to go fast, this is the game for you.

Lazy Sonic
Lazy Sonic is pretty up front with what it is. Rather than worry about accurate physics, or beautiful graphics, Lazy Sonic focuses on just… making a platformer with vaguely Sonic themes. It’s so simple in its premise and its execution that I don’t know if I can even really fill out a paragraph about the game. There are no loops, there aren’t even any slopes, really – and yet, somehow, none of that really seemed to impact my enjoyment of the game. For as simple – and let’s face it, lazy – this game seems, there’s almost an underlying sense of genuinely good game design It’s challenging and engaging in a good way, and I’d like to see what else this creator can cook up once they stop being so lazy.

First casualty: Rose of Longevity
Every year, there are fangames that just don’t work. Most of them, it would seem, are made in Game Maker. I seem to recall Rose of Longevity being at SAGE last year, but I do not think it was on my review schedule. This year it is, and unfortunately, the game hangs at the title card for the first level (“Amy Rose is now entering Level #1″). This is, as always, a quirk with the way Game Maker works: For some reason, certain pieces of scripting do not execute identically across all systems, which can lead to games that do not function as intended on somebody else’s computer. I’m sure this game worked fine for whoever made it, but it certainly doesn’t work fine for me, which means I cannot review it.