Sonic X-Treme Release Has Updated

WHHHHHHAAAAAAAAATTTTTTT?!?!?!?!

I've found you sonic x-treme!

Whoa, this is pretty cool if its legit. I'm a big fan of the classic Sonic games, so this does interest me. I always thought X-treme was a really interesting take on the Sonic series, and it was kind of a shame it never got released. It's lack of release probably didn't help the Saturn's terrible sales over here in the U.S. Of course it could been a terrible game, who knows. I could see the fisheye lens style of rendering eventually giving me headache or motion sickness.

What?

An engine has finally been dumped (or in the process of.) We've had all the resource files for it for a number of years.

Eh, to be honest I'm kinda glad it got scrapped in favor of Sonic Adventure, the game's weird fish-pov 2.5D graphics probably wouldn't have fared well up against Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot's full 3D worlds. I just wish Adventure came out earlier on the Sega Saturn instead of the Dreamcast and was programmed and developed better.

This isn't the first release of Sonic Xtreme content. Last I checked, the public won't get the source, only a built exe, despite the fact that the guy has the source.

EDIT: Wrote "fist", meant to write "first"

Sonic X-treme had really good soundtrack, I return to listen these amazing sounds from time to time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-C7dzWn70g

I don't understand the significance of this. Is it a home brew? Was it a scrapped Sonic game?

I think the biggest potential issue he has is there is no background yet and its already at 35 FPS. Personally, I prefer the 2D / 2.5D Sonic games.

geo said:

I don't understand the significance of this. Is it a home brew? Was it a scrapped Sonic game?

It was a scrapped game. It was supposed to be Sonic's leap into 3D on the Saturn, but this iteration suffered a lot of development problems and was eventually put to rest. One of the employees nearly became terminally ill working on it.

geo said:

I think the biggest potential issue he has is there is no background yet and its already at 35 FPS.

The background was just a 2D image. The engine performs well enough.

It's not just any scrapped Sonic game.

It's the scrapped Sonic game; what could've potentially been the first 3D Sonic game.

There's still a lot left to do, though. At this point the binaries are just barely running, and Jolly Roger still has a lot of things to fix to get it to work as close as possible to what was originally intended.

And this is the clincher: Only some of the assets were leaked. There's a shit ton of stuff exclusive to these prototypes. Something neat about this is that it'll really help speed along Andrew75's Project AXSX, a sort of remake/recreation/port of sorts of X-Treme to modern PCs using Unreal. The best part is that although the source won't be distributed, the assets will. So now everybody can Sonic the X-Treme.

I never understood the hate for X-Treme, it's graphics, or it's fisheye lens. I understand it's pretty fucking weird, but personally I've never been bothered by it. The graphics are probably perfect for both the Saturn and the series itself, as it always had an art-deco-polygonal-robotic-mindfuck look to it.

In the end, this game never got farther than early Alpha, and the engine was still being developed by this point. We'll never know for sure what X-Treme would've been, but you can imagine AXSX becoming only the best impossible outcome. It's likely a good thing it was cancelled, because what we're getting one day soon is Sonic 1 meets Mario 3D Land in crazyfuck mobius-strip realm. Only really polished and legitimately fun this time.

And for a little context, I present to you, Project AXSX:

I don't hate Sonic X from what little I've seen of it.... until I saw the second video. The camera felt dizzying just watching the entire screen rotate to keep Sonic on the ground. That could be why Mario Galaxy went to the sphere route.

I have another sticking point with turning the entire world. How does Sonic change gravity like that? Without signs or some sort of forward momentum guiding level designs those levels would get very confusing.

Looking at the second video, I think it would be crucial to have invisible walls to prevent people from falling off of sky high platforms. Unless they jump off or turn off the invisible wall in one section for a drop point.

I don't like the original video. I'm sure it wasn't done, but it just felt like Mario and not Sonic. The Ice level in the second video feels more Mario as well.

I'm not trying to rain on your good news, but I can understand why it was scrapped.

People are starting to make Sonic clones with Unreal 4.

Game devs can still do a lot with the Sonic character, 2D, 3D, constant running games, action games, fighting games.

Everything other than Jade Gully and the Red Sands (second-to-last map) in that video is a test level, meant to show off all the engine features/classic Sonic physics. The game also uses a spline system to keep Sonic from going way past fast straight towards an unfair death.

I am happy for you Sonic fans to have found this about a scrapped game. While I've completed all of the 2D Sonics (Genesis, GBA), I never felt the need to go out of my way for them. I never thought about them after I stopped playing them.

Sega did a good job to make Sonic stand out from Mario even if its still about collecting shinny round objects. This might sound funny, but I always felt Mario was faster than Sonic. Sonic had so many objects in the way preventing him from going fast. It feels like it takes a while to get Sonic up to full speed.

I felt like there needed to be more variety in Sonic than just a level change. Its the same way I judge all of the platform games coming out on Steam now. Is it as good as Mario 1? Do they offer more than just platforming? Is there a swimming segment? Swimming mechanic or is it just slow? At least the GBA games had different characters with different mechanics.

I had to look up why this is such a big deal and ended up reading a little bit about the development of this game. I fail to see how someone could become terminally ill on game that looks THAT undeveloped, or how it could require 20 hour days to work on...

StevieCybernetik said:

I had to look up why this is such a big deal and ended up reading a little bit about the development of this game. I fail to see how someone could become terminally ill on game that looks THAT undeveloped, or how it could require 20 hour days to work on...

I have a feeling the illness was from watching the damn screen rotate over and over.

Isn't pneumonia a disease common for sickly or bedridden people?

As someone that has been forced to work constant 18 - 20 hour days for weeks and months at a time. I've never been ill. I have become really shaky from no sleep. My manager called me Atlas for being the guy to work while everyone slept.

Maybe Chris and the other guy were the only two working on the game. Maybe Sega kept switching its tech like iD tech does.

Looking at sales 'records' for Sonic games. I wonder if Sonic is as popular as people think. The first one sold 15 million copies, the second sold 6 million, the third sold 1 million. Sonic and Knuckles only 1 million. That's still 4 of the top 10 Genesis games, but the fact the number kept going down is very telling.

Interesting Sonic 1 for mobile platforms has 8 million in sales. Sonic Adventure did 2.5 million, but the Sonic on GBA didn't break a million. Maybe its the marketing budget too.

I would agree about the sales. Eh, I really can't say I've played a Sonic game in years and each time a new one comes down the pike...I'm not all that excited. It's a time waster game, and Minecraft has taken the place of that for me since it first came out lol.

Coincidentally, I just spent $28 on the Sonic Collection for PC via humblebundle and not the $112 that Steam wants. I already own the Sonic Mega Collection Plus for PS2, but now that I own them on PC, I never need to buy them again.

Edit: Playing Sonic CD for the first time. Didn't die at all until the race against Robosonic. 1 hour after my first death, I'm still here.

geo said:

Interesting Sonic 1 for mobile platforms has 8 million in sales.

There's a good chance that those numbers were helped by that port being developed by Christian "Taxman" Whitehead, a well respected Sonic community regular.

geo said:

Sonic on GBA didn't break a million. Maybe its the marketing budget too.

Depends on which one you're talking about. If any of the Advance series, probably because the market for GBA games was smaller or something, not sure. If you're talking about "Sonic The Hedgehog Genesis", it was a terrible port which may have led to lower sales.

geo said:

Playing Sonic CD for the first time. Didn't die at all until the race against Robosonic. 1 hour after my first death, I'm still here.

CD is the best of the classic era games, IMO. I really think Naoto Oshima had a better idea of what to do with his character than the others.

Are you playing it with the JP or US soundtrack?

I was talking about any and all Sonic games for Game Boy Advance.

I was wrong. Apparently I was reading the Japanese sales and not the American sales.

Turns out:

Sonic Advance 1: 1.5 million
Sonic Advance 3: 1.5 million
Sonic Advance 2: 1 million

I always heard the GBA port of the original Sonic was awful. Never actually played it. Playing the Genesis hits collection on GBA (Echo the Dolphin, Golden Axe, Sonic Spinball) didn't instil my faith in old Genesis games.

I need to go check the soundtrack. It sounded very 90s. Very arcade 90s at that. Looks like it was the JP soundtrack.

The game really felt flat for me. After playing Sonic 1, 2 & 3 and all of the Sonic Advances... Sonic CD just felt stale. Like I had already played it a hundred times before.

geo said:

The game really felt flat for me. After playing Sonic 1, 2 & 3 and all of the Sonic Advances... Sonic CD just felt stale. Like I had already played it a hundred times before.

Keep its release context in mind.

Sonic 1 was developed by Sonic Team in the main Japanese branch of the company, with many concepts cut and unused due to the game being slightly rushed as far as I can tell. Once the first game was shipped, one half of Sonic Team went to California to join Sega Technical Institute in creating a cartridge-based sequel, led by Sonic Team lead tech Yuji Naka and helped by a whole bunch of rookie western developers.

Meanwhile, the other half of Sonic Team stayed in Japan to develop a high quality spinoff game for the CD addon platform, led by character designer Naoto Oshima. They essentially remixed the hell out of Sonic 1, by their own admission. Still, it was developed separately as an alternate direct sequel to the first game.

The rest of the games that came after Sonic CD took inspiration from it. The only other "real" Sonic games out there at the time were just 1 and 2, and 2 was being developed at the same time as CD with the only communication being very early on.

Even though I prefer the JP soundtrack, I do think the US soundtrack provides a nice ambiance (though the Sonic Boom album arrangements are more polished).

While there is a rich development story about a Japanese man traveling to California working with rookie developers that would make a movie one day... I only played Sonic CD :-)

I feel Sonic 2 had the higher quality. While Sonic CD did try to branch out into past, present and future, it held no appeal to me. It wasn't a necessary part of the game so much as a diversion.

Sadly Sonic CD enemies would simply drop flowers instead of hopping bouncing living animals to really push the power.

When I was a kid my friends and I would play the fuck out of Sonic 3. I felt there was a giant leap in presentation. Going back to play it now, I have a tough time getting into Sonic 3.

geo said:

Sadly Sonic CD enemies would simply drop flowers instead of hopping bouncing living animals to really push the power.

Eggman is literally stealing the planet's life essence to power his machines in CD. That explains why the planet becomes fully mechanical by bad future's present. Also, if you get a good future in the stage, you see those hopping bouncing living animals inhabiting the stage. Or, alternatively, by destroying a Metal Sonic projector stepping on a critter in the past.

Thanks to achievements I was able to see a pink Eggman for taking out those generators. Without achievements I would have completed the game in under 3 hours and never looked back. Without the Doom forum I would have never known how interesting the game is.

As I was playing it, I kept thinking of Daikatana. A very metal world. Going back and forward in time. The story of the game is more interesting than the game.

They've got the editor up and running.

And I'll just echo what Kroc on Assembler said:

Kroc said:

"I registered to say that this is the first time I've ever grokked what Sonic Xtreme is about. I always wrote it off in the past as an early attempt at 3D platforming that would be awful to play.
This, this though is immensely innovative and I've rarely ever known a 3D platformer that just 'works' in 3D; that is "at home" with 3D. Crash Bandicoot shoehorned 2D into a 3D tunnel -- it's a good game, but not innovative. Mario 64 is plagued with camera issues as are almost all 3D platformers. Mario Galaxy is the only thing I can compare it to, and whilst Mario Galaxy is close to perfect, it still has some issues with having to wrestle control of the camera. In Sonic Xtreme, the camera is as natural a part of the control as is the directional pad. The fish-eye lens, though odd, solves a lot of design issues that 3D games wrestled with up until around 2001. For 1995, Sonic Xtreme has insanely good design.

They were stupid not to release it. Grid-based 3D design had a short lifespan, it was necessary in the mid 90s due to hardware limits and the best games worked _with_ it, rather than against it (Tomb Raider). By the time of the Dreamcast, such gird-based 3D was seen as limiting and too many games were trying to force full 3D movement on game designs that struggled to cope with it; Sonic Adventure, whilst a good game, is pained by its struggle to be true 3D, and a Sonic-style platformer. Xtreme has the perfect blend of 'fast bits' and 'slow bits' exactly the same as the 2D Sonic games before it. Sonic Adventure's fast bits are too much on auto-pilot and the slow bits are marred by the camera and clunky 3D movement.

I really look forward to some kind of 'complete' game coming from this, I very much enjoy the level design possibilities."

Dude ... !

This has become very exciting.

Well i never thought Sonic X-Treme will be completed someday after Sega Released "Sonic World" ....

Wah! This is amazing! I recall seeing some Sonic Xtreme footage several years back, though I'm not sure if it was genuine or not. That editor caption looks great!

Does anyone get a Minecraft vibe from the editor?