BlazeHedgehog

Red came back and posted a little here 9-12 months ago. He also does some music work for MSPA: Homestuck (a couple of songs sound very close to unused music he did for me for TFH way back in the day ).

If you've got a red ring and the Xbox is less than two (or is it three?) years old, you can get it repaired for free. Hit up 1-800-MY-XBOX and look in to it.

The short of it is a HDD crash. There's a longer story to it, including how the HDD crash was partially my own fault, but the lesson here is: Always back up your stuff as often as possible. I didn't. I lost over a year's worth of data. Which, as you may have guessed, included what was going to be the "final" version of Sonic 2006 2D. I never, ever, ever intended on doing the whole game - it started as a side project to pass the time before the game itself was released, and after Sonic 2006 was released and was such a trash bomb, it made me feel kind of guilty to work on it. Still, the length of it always bothered me, so I was planning one final release with: - The whole game ported to Multimedia Fusion 2, with the additional effects afforded by it - Kingdom Valley, Acts 1 & 2 - White Acropolis, Acts 1 & 2 - A Boss Fight against Silver - One of the game's cutscenes remade with game sprites (with the dialog re-written in my own stupid, egotistical attempt to make it "better") - Sand Oasis, from Sonic and the Secret Rings (complete with soul gauge and speed break) - The ability to record and race against time trial ghosts - A secret "realistic" mode that would artificially inflate loading times and potentially alter gameplay in other strange/annoying ways Alas, all of that is gone forever now! It's for the better, though, really. All I have leftover from that is a single EXE build of White Acropolis Act 1 without any enemies or rings. It would seem that none of my beta testers kept the betas I gave them.

And my framerate is starting to take a hit. Not a fault of the game, but a fault of my computer, clearly.

In the 5th or 6th grade me and my "friends" decided we'd make our own Sonic game. After I ditched those assholes I decided to continue on trying to make a game myself and I ended up stumbling upon Sonic Robo-Blast (the first one) here at SFGHQ. People were claiming it was the current high-water mark for Sonic fangames. I was unimpressed, and with a "Well, jeeze, I could do better than that!" attitude, I began looking in to how to make games using Click N' Create and coming up with an idea that would prove more successful.

RedXVI, Davie Slam, Skahott... A few others I can remember as people but can't remember their usernames to save my life.

Well, yeah, that's the thing. There are some "Hey, don't use this" things, but it's on a faceless corporation level. You don't have any individual artist coming here on a personal level telling us to stop. You also have to keep in mind that if you steal a person's content, you are likely discouraging that user to keep producing content, leaving you with nothing to steal.

I think people are entitled to original content that they themselves have made. If I make a sprite for myself, and I say "Please don't use this, this is mine", I expect those wishes to be upheld. The thing is, nobody at Sega has said that about official game content, and it's not like there's an easy way to contact the original proprietors. Especially when we're talking 15-year-old content, here. If somebody from Dimps or Sonic Team posted and said "Hey, this stuff is off limits", I'm sure some of us would probably honor those wishes. As for existing ripped content? Who really gives a crap who ripped it. I mean, c'mon. I could go to Mystic Forest Zone, I could go to The Spriter's Resource, I could go to SFGHQ and between those three sites, five or six people have ripped the same set of sprites. How is any one of those people going to know that I'm using their sheet unless I specifically point them out? They aren't, especially when I could have just ripped them myself (and sometimes have to - I'm surprised at how many incomplete sets there are of certain things). Me saying "Please don't use this" also helps fuel a small degree of competition, which is essential in a creative community. Otherwise, everybody would be cherry picking the same pre-determined "Best" stuff (or make deliberately ugly games just to stand out from the pack).

Why are Sonic's colors so washed out?

You "made" those, huh? How strange that all the letters are identical in size and color to the ones I made I don't actually care that much if you use my goal ring graphics, considering how easy they were to make. But you really shouldn't pass a simple edit off as original. Editing a few pixels when somebody doesn't agree to fork over their graphics isn't the way to go.

That made me laugh a little bit.

...Edweirdo?

I almost feel bad for Blazefire. It takes practice to be this pathetic.

Sonic 2006 Sonic? I'm going to be ill.

Not bad. I was surprised how well this ran on my PC, since UT3 noticably chugs on higher detail settings. I mean, I guess this basically is just a big empty test map... but still. Looking forward to seeing an animated Sonic running around in here.

I don't have much to say here other than what's already been said. Still, I'll say it again: Graphics are nice and detailed, but color palettes make it difficult to tell apart the foreground and background. The background should probably be a darker color than the stuff you can stand on. (the colors in Neon Night borderline on being tacky because of clashing colors, too) Enemy movement patterns are a little too fast and erratic. Enemies since the dawn of time have been about analyzing their patterns and exploiting them. Enemies have to move in dependable/predictable ways and at speeds that the player is comfortable approaching them at. Enemies that blend in with the background are also kind of iffy (blue enemy on blue bg makes it hard to tell which is which, especially at speed) The level design could probably use a little more polish. There are jumps in Calcified Cavern that feel like Sonic can just barely make them. Again, this does not breed a comfortable environment for the player. I actually got really frustrated at the part where you have to grab on to the monkey bars because the game gives you zero indication that they're there and jumping from monkey bar to monkey bar is tricky. You probably shouldn't introduce a new game mechanic like that in a life-or-death situation right off the bat at the start of a level. The interface for this game is absolutely bizarre, especially for somebody like me who primarily plays these games with a gamepad (it's a Sonic game, after all). Pressing enter, clicking with the mouse, being able to scroll through the levels on my gamepad but again, having to press enter to start the level... its not a requirement to support gamepads, but it's nice. Regardless, having to use the mouse to select a character is very weird and feels out of place in a game like this. I will say that I do like the "feel" of this game, though. I like the music and you have some nice touches here and there. It's just got this feeling of "almost, but not quite". You're on the edge of producing something great!

Have you ever considered trying to write your own level editor for this? Like, so people don't have to download and fool around with GameMaker, they can just make and play levels from the game here.

I've never gotten any if the file encryption stuff to work, so what I do to curb INI hacking is to create a simple checksum - or, in other words, a secret "password" that is created by the game and only the game knows how to decode. This is probably what USC was talking about, but he was a bit vague. Let's say you save Number A, Number B, and Number C to an INI file as your save data. When you write data to your INI file, write an additional value - which, for the sake of this example, is going to be called Number D. Number D = (Number A + Number * Number C. It doesn't have to be this exact combination, but add/multiply/subtract/divide all the numbers in your save file together in a unique way and save that to your INI file as Number D. This is your "checksum". Keep in mind how you add your numbers together. When you load data from the INI file, create two counters. The first counter should be your "checksum" loaded directly out of the INI file (Number D). In the second counter, re-add all of the data from the INI file ((Number A + Number * Number C). If the loaded checksum matches the freshly calculated checksum, then nobody has edited your save file. If the numbers don't match, that means somebody tried to change the file without knowing how the game generated its checksum. From there it's a simple matter of how you want to deal with cheaters who try to edit your save files. I usually make my games delete the hacked save file in question or reset all of the data inside of it to 0.

I'd say don't change engines simply because UE3 stuff runs poorly for me.

We have enough trouble getting 2D fangames completed. 3D fangames take that much more work. SRB2 was created using 15-20 year old tech and it still took 11 years to get where it is - the supposed "final" release. BlitzSonic went nowhere, Ashura: Dark Reign is crawling along at a snail's pace, and that Sonic Halo mod is not very good in my opinion. Don't hold your breath. Swearing "all of Sonic in 3D will be crap" seems a bit foolish to me, though - just because Sonic Team can't seem to figure it out doesn't mean Sonic in 3D is doomed. Sonic Team just kind of sucks nowadays, that's all. Look at Billy Hatcher and NiGHTS on the Wii. Sonic in 3D will work, it just needs the right group of people to do it properly.

Yeah, I was too lazy to post it here. I've also come to think that maybe these small incremental "look at what I've done to the engine" updates are silly. Which is why the update is basically "Hey, I won't be posting any new updates until I do something substantial like a new demo."

Since the numbering of my reviews ended up weird, I ended up basically talking about 12 games in the span of only 7 reviews. We have: Gemini, Mettrix, Megaman TT, Sonic Whirlwind, Zeta Overdrive, Mecha Madness, and Cooperationation. Project Darkness, Sonic Adventure 3, Sonic the Gizoid, and Sonic Universe Adventure also get mentions, though probably not in the way their creators would hope.

The Camera L/R controls only work for analog gamepad mode, which is a bit tricky to set up in this version (you have to bind the analog axis separately from the keys). I'd argue that the camera for analog mode may be worse because it inherits some the problems of the Sonic Adventure camera (getting stuck behind objects, etc.) Regardless, I'd never play SRB2 without a gamepad in analog mode. It's still not perfect, but it feels a lot more natural to me that way. This might have started out as a first person shooter, but I couldn't stand to play it like one anymore.

Hm. It feels like one. I guess that's a compliment, then!

More review briefs. Sonic Zero Remastered, Ashura Dark Reign, WTFlame, Shadow 2, and Super Sonic Knockout.