Sonic X-Treme Release Has Updated

Patch93 said:

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 and was programmed and developed better.

To the contrary, I think Mario 64 kind of sucks. Don't get me wrong, it's an ambitious and ahead-of-its-time title, but I recently played Super Mario 3D Land on the Wii U, and it's a much more satisfying experience, because its restrictive nature makes it much easier to navigate. I remember trying to play Sonic Adventure and, years later, finding Sonic Generations to much more accessible. Sonic X-Treme is a bit convoluted looking, but I think it could have worked beautifully.

EDIT: I do understand your point though, because the whole combination of sprites and polygonal layouts has to be handled very carefully in order to work.

The funny thing about Super Mario 64 is that it was released 3 days before the actual Nintendo 64 was released(well at least the North America release)

GoatLord said:

because its restrictive nature makes it much easier to navigate.

I haven't tried the new Mario on WIIu but I disagree about "Mario 64" sucks. Was one of my favorite games ever. I bought the PSX and always felt left out because of it. In comparison, "Crash Bandicoot" games are extremely restrictive and remind me of a sort of "Donkey Kong" rip off using polygons. It's even more restrictive than "Sonic X-treme" (even "Lost World" PSX is better). "Ocarina of Time" is also really open and free roaming (can go anywhere you want in a real open 3D world). Only games that remind me of "Mario 64" and "Ocarina of Time" are MMORPG's like "World of Warcraft".

Although its a weird and unusual perspective, the fisheye look works in the players favor by letting him see what's ahead of him. I like sonic but my biggest pet peeve was that youre always blindly running. Youre always centered on the screen and you move too fast to adequately time jumps or evade instant death crushers, spikes, and pitfalls without foreknowledge. Without practice, I rarely get past flying battery zone on sonic and knuckles. The fisheye lens perspective fixes that to a certain degree while retaining the platformer attributes.

I despise everything to do with Mario 64. And this is coming from someone who used to love that game as a young kid.

I just can't have fun playing it, there's just so many design decisions that infuriate me.

So many people go on about how it's all free roaming and shit and that's fucking bonkers. Look at Tall Tall Mountain, Rainbow Ride, they're just a whole bunch of linear floating platforms in space. This wouldn't be so bad if Mario didn't control like complete ass. I mean, just play a game like Rayman 2 or Spyro or even Crash. Hell, play Super Mario World, and then play Mario 64. Mario has like, zero air control in the latter, while in the former you can perfectly adjust where he is as you wish. This is fucking bull, and it makes platforming that would be fun in any other game a goddamn chore.

It's like, have you ever went to sleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night only to find out you slept on your arm and now it's a floppy piece of shit that can only be thrown in the general direction of where you want to go? That's Mario 64.

Right now place your finger on your nose, right between your eyes. Now, if you aren't drunk off of your ass, chances are your finger went right where you wanted it to and you didn't jab your eye out. That's Mario World.

And back again to what we were talking about before, the maps that aren't floating things in space aren't too bad. You go along, avoiding things, jumping a bit. Alright, but then comes Tiny Huge island or Shifting Sand Land and it's like holy shit just stop sliding on every fucking thing that isn't completely flat. You'd think the bastard was carved out of Air-gel or something the way he slides around on fucking grass of all things. Or, it might be grass, could be green rubber for all I know, since the N64's pretty shit in terms of textures. In the end, it's pretty sad when a magic cartoon plumber can jump his own body height but can't conquer a gentle hill, something even I can do. Something citizens of San Francisco must do times a thousand daily else they starve to death.

I understand it's to create a sort of natural border for the levels (didn't stop them neglecting that in later maps), but why not just put in a cliff or a simple stone wall?

Aight, so Mario's a bit on the greasy side, we know that now, so let's just put that aside and avoid anything that could be considered too convenient for us to simply walk up. So that holds true until Shifting Sand Land, where all of a sudden the near-ninety-degree pillars can be walked up without issue. How intuitive, right?

And now on to the simple basic design of the game: the gating. I hate it. I hate having to go through the same places again and again and again until the game says I can move on. It all feels like a way to make the game seem longer, to make up for the amount of courses that were cut from the original game plan. What was that number, 32? Damn, that means over half the game was thrown out, that's some Sonic 2 level shit right there.

I just, I dunno. It doesn't really feel so much like an adventure as it does a bad case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. This may have something to with the castle setting, as even though I do all this bull in the paintings, everything happened in a goddamn painting. And for all that, I only progress a few meters within the same building. Kinda makes the whole thing seem pointless.

And the soundtrack, I get it's a Mario game, there tends to be an uneven ratio of tracks to levels, I get that. But most other Mario games have courses of only a minute or so in length. Now we got the same durhappy style soundtrack in a game that requires a lot stopping, slowing down, and peering around with the game's clunky camera system. I don't even like Mario 64's not-quite-jazzy-enough jazzy main theme all that much, so you can imagine this got grating pretty fast. They could have at least had one more song.

And, to be honest, this game slightly unnerves me. Something about the castle... it's almost uncanny in the way that it's a building, yes. That's easy to identify, but I cannot imagine anyone or anything living there. It's not even about realism, no. Mario will always be a cartoon character, but even Donald Duck has a kitchen, so why the fuck not the princess? Even Mario RPG at least had bedrooms in the castle and people's homes. There's nothing in these castles but those fucking paintings. Maybe she eats those, I dunno.

Hell, what's with all these painting worlds? Do these things act as portals throughout the Mushroom Kingdom, or are these just entire worlds within the canvases? If the latter, does this mean they were always there and Bowser only made it possible to enter them, or did he actually bring these realms to life using the stars?

Jaxxoon R said:

I despise everything to do with Mario 64. And this is coming from someone who used to love that game as a young kid.

I just can't have fun playing it, there's just so many design decisions that infuriate me.

It's like, have you ever went to sleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night only to find out you slept on your arm and now it's a floppy piece of shit that can only be thrown in the general direction of where you want to go? That's Mario 64.

Right now place your finger on your nose, right between your eyes. Now, if you aren't drunk off of your ass, chances are your finger went right where you wanted it to and you didn't jab your eye out. That's Mario World.

This pretty much sums up how I feel, only with less Internet rage. Anyway, you mentioned Spyro and I would have to say that it's pretty much a perfect example of free roaming maps and EXCELLENT controls working in tandem. Now, this was two years after Mario 64, so the devs had an advantage in terms of the learning process, but honestly, Mario 64 shouldn't have gotten past testing, considering how poorly it controls and how awful the camera is.

I dunno, I mean, this was Nintendo's first true foray into 3D, so maybe I should cut them some slack. But Spyro is still extremely playable (and beautiful), while I have no desire to return to Mario 64.

I couldn't get into a Mario 64, BUT I understand their logic for going that route. You can't push out new technology with something that isn't ground breaking. It was completely new and fresh with familiar characters.

Not to completely derail the topic but I couldn't get into Mario Kart 64. It was so dull. Long spans where nothing happened. No sense of speed. A decade later my cousins and I played it and suddenly it was fun. What game isn't fun with friends. That's what makes them your friends.

I've never found excitement for any Sonic game ever, except maybe my brothers copy of S&K when I was very young and didn't own my own console and games.

Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 were some of my favorite games as a kid, and I played the shit out of them, so it's kind of odd that my love of the Sonic franchise both began and ended there. Well, it didn't help that I never had a Genesis (nor, for a long time, any home console apart from a Dreamcast), but frankly I don't think the interest was there for me anyway.

Still, the existence of an editor for this does have me intrigued.

Prototype 718 has few unused sounds,textures....etc,but it wasn't enough and didn't look anything like Sonic X-Treme that we've seen on few gameplay leaks,christian senn,and few other developers still have an almost complete version,maybe we can convince them to release it

It's (in the process of) being released now.

Multiple builds of it, in fact.

Jaxxoon R said:

It's (in the process of) being released now.

Multiple builds of it, in fact.

I wonder how long will it take,i'm hearing the same sentence since 2006

Just so you know, the build from 2006 was for Project Condor, the game's boss engine programmed by Christina Coffin; That one's been out for years now.

The one we didn't have (until now at least) is the game's main engine, the one by Ofer Alon. Those are the ones in the process of being released now. There's multiple source codes from multiple builds across multiple systems, so that's one reason why it's taking so long to do.

And yes, as weird as it sounds, the game would've really switched between the two engines, here at about 12:00 in this video you can see the boss engine in action.

Waffenak said:

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

Finding it wierd how Sega used the Soundtrack of Blue Ocean Act 3 for Big's emerald Coast ,and a song from Mario 64 as a theme for 1st Act,and Death egg zone's Soundtrack is also used for SADx after canceling SX,and Sonic CD Quartz Quadrant Good Future song for Jade Gully "Oh god why didn't they just copy The entire game :3"

Jaxxoon R said:

Just so you know, the build from 2006 was for Project Condor, the game's boss engine programmed by Christina Coffin; That one's been out for years now.
.

these tech demos ? Are they based on ofer alon's Fisheye engine cause i still didn't give em a try ..
http://adf.ly/Cbg7r

Americans did better on Saturn IMO. Even compared to Sega. Don't know why Americans did some of the best demonstrations on Sega systems. Probably follow KISS principle or something.

Holering said:

Americans did better on Saturn IMO. Even compared to Sega. Don't know why Americans did some of the best demonstrations on Sega systems. Probably follow KISS principle or something.

Yup,the bad japaneese quality ,take as an example a japaneese mouse :3 buying it will be just a waste of money :3

I didn't quite want to download those files (kind of paranoid but better safe than sorry), are they the demo with Sonic running about in the field with the rising and falling hills? Because that one's the Boss engine, and it didn't use the fisheye at all from what I've seen.

I never heard of American-made Saturn games being higher quality before, interesting. Can someone give me a list of example titles to look at? I know that American-made SNES and Genesis games tended to be slow and clunky, so maybe it had changed by the time the PS1/Saturn/64 rolled onto the scene.

Doom should be made with this engine. Berserk pak with fish-eye ftw.

Jaxxoon R said:

I never heard of American-made Saturn games being higher quality before, interesting. Can someone give me a list of example titles to look at? I know that American-made SNES and Genesis games tended to be slow and clunky, so maybe it had changed by the time the PS1/Saturn/64 rolled onto the scene.

Adventures of Batman and Robin Sega CD and Genesis. Saturn: NBA Jam TE, College Slam, Robotica, Duke 3D, Powerslave, Quake, and others. If you run Powerslave in an emulator, it shows only one SH2 used for everything (except GPU drawing graphics), and sound is high quality. Alien Trilogy also uses only one sh2. One sh2 looks better than r3000a (psx) because it has internal cache and it seems a lot better even if one rated at less mips (r3000a needs external cache controller for cache, and it was very old from 1989). Internal cache is better than external cache. Saturn can use both sh2s if one works in cache so it sounds better to me (cache is way faster than system memory).

Sega Saturn failed because of Sonic X-Treme i guess (Just as Megadrive didn't Handle it,Saturn also didn't),The game begun as a Genesis game for the 32X System although the Developement was Moved to the Saturn,the Saturn was a good system for it's time,but unfortunately due to low Proccessing of the Machine and Bad quality,it wasn't good enough to Handle SX,so sega decided to start from the beginning (after Experiencing lack of Quality,bad timing) by creating SADX,the First 3D Sonic game for the Dreamcast,and they used some of the Soundtracks which was supposed to be for SX .From what i gathered Sonic Adventure is a Complete Re-Creation of Sonic X-Treme for a Brand new System .

DMGUYDZ64 said:

From what i gathered Sonic Adventure is a Complete Re-Creation of Sonic X-Treme for a Brand new System.

Not really, no. Xtreme was handled by a western division of Sega, STI (same company that handled Sonic 2 16-bit and Spinball). Sonic Adventure was an entirely separate project being developed much more quietly at roughly the same time by Sonic Team themselves. Sonic World, the 3D demo in Sonic Jam, is actually an early build of the engine.

Speaking of SA1, I recently went back and played the game. It amazes me how shitty the game feels, having not touched it for years. The controls feel really clunky, Sonic just goes all over the place. The physics feel like shit, the character will spazz out when stepping onto the street from the sidewalk. You can jump into the ceiling and stay stuck there for a brief moment if you continue holding the button.

Then there's the object pop-in, my god it's bad. I've really become accustomed to full view distance in games, I cannot go back. I also cannot accept how horrid the camera is, it is very difficult to control. When I need it to move the most is when it is the least cooperative (like stuck in a tight space).

Some of the level transitions are jarring, especially between sections of Sky Deck. Like, I'll clear the goal of one section, only to be plopped in a completely unrelated place a split-second later. There's also quite a few issues with music cues, sometimes a song will start over midway through a cutscene just because it loaded a new section to show. Other times, when changing songs, it feels jarring because they didn't bother to fade the previous song.

The voice acting and dialog is horrendous. I just use the Japanese voice track, the performances are slightly less shit and I can't cringe as hard when I don't know what they're saying. I like the music though, that part has aged well.

I can't help but feel that the game seriously needed a few more months to be worked on. I have a very hard time enjoying it in its released state. The game also felt much shorter than I remember it. Like, a lot shorter. I finished Sonic's campaign in a couple of hours, and even then I wasn't playing very well. If I actually put effort into it I could probably complete it in an hour or less.

Not to talk about thousands of Unused features ...
http://info.sonicretro.org/Game_Secrets:Sonic_Adventure

Sodaholic said:

Speaking of SA1, I recently went back and played the game. It amazes me how shitty the game feels, having not touched it for years. The controls feel really clunky, Sonic just goes all over the place. The physics feel like shit, the character will spazz out when stepping onto the street from the sidewalk. You can jump into the ceiling and stay stuck there for a brief moment if you continue holding the button.

First time I've heard someone talk about SA1 like that lol. I think I liked it better than SA2. I really liked it. It felt more adventurous and wide open compared to SA2. SA2 was more linear and 2D like, and didn't have open worlds to explore; reminded me of stages on Super Mario World for SNES or something. It was really cool playing SA1 the first time and the later levels were huge. Still not as good as Mario 64 IMO but I thought it was pretty good. Dreamcast was the only Sega system I bought instead of others (Nintendo or Sony) and I'm glad I got it with Mortal Kombat Gold (was so surprised how better it was than arcade). Metal Gear Solid and GT2 Bleemcasts were the best, and Resident Evil Code Veronica. Yeah yeah, hm hehe hmhmhm he.

I Still actually have SADX on my steam account,and playing it from time to time,and like you said i prefer it more then SA2,i even enjoy finding it's glitches/bugs and hidden Rooms >_< .....

I actually like SA1 more than SA2, it feels a lot closer to the classic games. SA2 took a really annoying edgy Y2K feel to its theming and aesthetics. SA1's badniks were still cartoony, the music was a lot more synth-pop than butt-rock (if that's actually a thing, I dunno, I heard it described like that before) and the sound effects were still cartoony (tone when jumping in SA1 instead of a whoosh sound in subsequent games).

I think SA1 is a good game at its core (certainly better than what followed), but the implementation was rushed and unfinished and it harms the end-user experience very much.

Andrew75 of Sonic Retro said:

Jollyroger is Breaking it down!

Kind of a recap of what's going on. The code we have here is like a snapshot in time caught in the middle of an engine overhaul, and because of that many aspects for the Editor/engine are broken.

JR states that One example is the code that calculates the shading of polygons based on their distance to the camera. When they are far enough from the camera they are supposed to fade to black but the original programmer forgot to initialize a variable, so ALL the other polygons were rendered with a pretty much random value.
That value turns out to be completely transparent most of the time... it doesn't make sense at all for them to be all alpha blended, it is a waste of processing time, JR will eventually change the code to blend only the polygons that actually need blending.

The editor has essentially two modes, in one you navigate the level with the mouse and you can edit the level, one block at a time or by strips of blocks.
In the second mode sonic is playable. Sonic can jump, run up and down slopes, He can even run loops inside the long tunnel in the map.
There is also a separate build setting which lets you build only the engine, with no editor. (gameplay only)

You guys may recognize this area from one of the magazine screens. although the camera and sonic are off to the right of that magazine screenshot.

Get Hype'd get Snoic'd guys.

Turns out they're porting it to modern hardware for whatever reason.

Andrew75 on Sonic Retro said:

Hey guys ! JollyRoger has some updates for us!
Here we see that he has started to port the source code of the NV1 engine. He changed the original code so that it compiles using the latest Visual Studio and he is writing a new OpenGL rendering backend that replaces all the NV1 code
Basically this is the original Sonicboom version 37 but recompiled in Windows 8.1 and with OpenGL rendering the polygons.

Run04.def ( which is a variation of the red brick area)


Run24.def (which is the Gold tile Level)

Unless this is needed to allow us casuals to run this on our hardware, I don't see the point. It would be like finding an unreleased Doom beta and modifying it to include OpenGL rendering. It's defeating the posterity of a beta. We don't expect it to be beyond it's historical context.

It means for a playable build and for further exploration of the contents without using rare, 20-year-old hardware. Also, they can't release the original source code if that's what you were hoping for. The original programmer would be extremely unhappy.

Let's face it this game will never be released,looks like it's video code is almost 20 years old and only designed for few old Graphics cards and old Operating systems (Never seen chris playing it through a modern Operating system in leaked videos),which means it may not work with modern Operating systems ..
EDIT : We're not even sure if they're working on it,we have no absolute release date and not many informations about how will the Final build work "Except Gameplays" .