SAGE 2011: Review Slew #1

I’m still unsure if Sonic Run 3 is a joke.

Boy, SAGE 2011 just sort of snuck up out of nowhere, didn’t it? It was on Friday night that it suddenly dawned on me: Wait, SAGE starts this weekend! And with it begins the long road to writing a whole bunch of words about fangames. But enough with the formalities, let’s get to work.

Project Float
Maybe one day, Project Float will be a videogame, but today is not that day. There’s certainly an identifiable amount of charm to what’s here, but it’s also quite clearly very early – Gamepad support only works half the time (certain interactive objects require me to press my keyboard’s arrow keys instead of using my controller’s d-pad, for example), and that’s not counting the extremely basic and almost completely empty level design. Sure, it’s something that’s playable, but there isn’t really a reason you’d want to play it just yet. I’m sure the creator(s) of this game have some great ideas for what they want this game to be, and I’m interested in seeing what they’ll be offering… when there’s more to offer.

Sonic RealmZ
Purportedly in development since 2009, Sonic RealmZ comes from our Russian Sonic fans and attempts some kind of online multiplayer action RPG. The game quite obviously aspires to greatness – as evident by the pre-rendered FMV intro showing the camera pan around weapons while touching piano music plays. It’s in the first shot of this pre-rendered FMV that you can make out a mouse cursor accidentally left in the video – giving a pretty good indication of what’s to follow. After combating the game’s character creator, I was dumped in to a gigantic, relatively featureless plain with a couple of enemies. The game offers very little feedback as to when you’re taking damage, so death was often swift, unpredictable, and worse still, usually unpreventable. Despite the presence of a sword on my back, I was apparently not allowed to use it for attacks. The readme file describes controls for features that as far as I can tell (by the 10 or 20 minutes I spent roaming around what may as well been an endless void) are not enabled in this demo. Even jumping on an enemy’s head is supremely difficult, thanks to controls that feel like they are more suited to World of Warcraft than they are a Sonic game. It may have taken three years to get to this point, but it’s obviously got a very, very, very long road still ahead of it.

Sonic Run 3
No HUD, no rings, no enemies, no music, no sounds. Can this even be considered a game? The best part is, once you finish the demo, you’re told that the next one will feature enemies and bosses – when Sonic Run 3 last year most definitely featured those things! I was also assured last year that Sonic Run 3 was not, infact, some kind of elaborate prank – and this year’s appearance is even more confusing than it was previously. Cute Sonic sprite aside, this is obviously a pretty significant step back! When SAGE 2012 rolls around, what will Sonic Run 3 look like, then? An executable that launches in to a gallery of still images, perhaps?

Sonic Worlds Level Collab
Now here’s something I can get behind. It used to be that getting together a “team” to work on a fangame was basically impossible. Everybody was so focused on their own “vision” that nobody wanted to really help anyone else out in any significant, meaningful ways. Level collabs, on the other hand, have been gaining a fair amount of popularity these days – before being shut down by Nintendo, I saw no less than three successful Super Mario Bros. X level collabs being completed (Super Talking Time Bros. being a favorite of mine). The Sonic Worlds Level Collab hopes to accomplish the same – and while it’s not done yet (the demo here features two zones and a boss), the level of support from within the community looks to be promising. Worth checking out!

Sonic: Time Twisted
Last year, Sonic Time Twisted showcased a massive improvement over its 2009 SAGE entry. This year, Overbound has announced that Time Twisted will be changing engines – to Mercury’s SonicGMX, which promises 1:1 accuracy with the Sega Genesis Sonic games. This is demonstrated here with a pretty much identical port of Scrap Brain Zone Act 1 from the original Sonic the Hedgehog, with added features such as Spindash and digital music. It’s impressive stuff to be sure, but Time Twisted‘s been a long time coming now and I was kind of hoping to see something more than what basically amounts to the project dumping back down to an engine test again (albeit an impressive one). Also, I don’t know if the game is using special GameMaker shader effects or what, but when it opens and after it closes, it causes my monitor to flicker.

Amy Dress Up
Well… this is certainly… interesting. And not for me. I may have questioned whether or not Sonic Run 3 was actually a game, but there’s no question here. This is, essentially, a glorified paper doll. You can put clothes on Amy Rose or take them off, and when you’re done, you can save it to a screenshot. That’s, uh… that’s it. Not really a whole lot else you can say about it beyond that.

Sonic Axiom
And here we are – crowd favorite from last year, Sonic Axiom is an early contender of SAGE 2011 “Game of the Show”. For those of you just joining us at home, Sonic Axiom is basically Sonic CD minus the time travel. Though everybody last year was enamored with the game, I felt it clearly needed more work – I encountered my fair share of bugs back then, in addition to a relatively muddy color palette. Sonic Axiom is back with more levels and more cohesive art direction – but the game is still kind of rough around the edges. Bosses swing wildly between being too easy and fairly difficult, characters still have weird animations, and more than once I experienced bugs coming out of special stages. The first time, I was returned to a checkpoint much earlier in the level, and the second time, I actually managed to somehow get checkpointed stuck underneath the floor, forcing me to close out of the game and relaunch it. That’s to say nothing of the Special Stage itself, which asks you to collect 35 rings but neglects to tell you what to do with them after you’ve collected those 35 (there’s an extra step the game never communicates to the player). But, hey, Sonic Axiom is about as good as one should probably expect from one guy not only making, but finishing a Sonic fangame these days, and Axiom is still pretty fun in spite of it’s slight lack of polish. Don’t miss this one.

I’ll be back again tomorrow with seven more SAGE reviews – so stay tuned!