I've broken out of the duldrums of completing Sonic Adventure 2 after having finished all the Chao garbage, and I've been playing...
A Boatload of fan games! namely from the Sonic Amateur Game Expo (SAGE) 2017 showcase! but also one or two distinctly non-sonic games.
I'll not go into too much detail about a lot of 'em becaus ethere's unfortunatley not a ton that stands out from the pack this year as there was Last year. lots of stuff either made on Sonic Worlds or just GameMaker Studio or such. there's a really bad Unreal 4 3D sonic game, and something I thought might have the potential to be the next Freedom Planet (Freedom Planet originally was shown at SAGE 2012), but was total bunk... there's 3 games I'd like to highlight from that here quick.
Sonic The Hedgehog 2 HD
IT'S BACK FROM THE GRAVE, BBY.
Sonic 2 HD was a project started in 2011 or so and essentially redid the assets of SOnic 2 in a vectorized style with tons of frames of animation added in to give the game a very... moving cartoon sort of look? while still staying as faithful to the original animations in the game and the art style as possible. there was an Emerald Hill demo back in 2012, and then the team broke up for some reason.
Thankfully, a couple of the alumni from that original team (Tom Fry, Jared Kasl, and Tee Lopes) would go on to form Pagoda West Games, and eventually bring their animation, programming, and musical expertise to Sonic Mania.
With a fair bit of the ground work laid out, a new team has been formed and knocked out a new zone in the form of Chemical plant, as well as finishing work on Hill top (which was hidden in the debug code for the demo the original team put together, since it's blue Emerald Hill)
Sonic feels decidedly a little heavier here than normal and takes a bit to get going at even a decent clip, and there's a couple of small things that are off here and there, but for the most part, it's Sonic 2 level design, sonic 2 enemy behavior, and... really, everything you'd love about Sonic 2 so far. I'm kinda lukewarm on Sonic 2, but i can't deny how amazingly clean and well animated the art is here and how good it feels.
Petit Hedgehog
This one crushed my soul, because it just... seems like it's still too early to really properly judge it, as the engine is still buggy as all hell.
Petit Hedgehog, as it's called right now, is a Sonic game that has a really unique and neat sprite style (lots of solid colors without shading, decidedly bright color palette) along with playable Sonic and Shadow. listening to the hissy compression on the sound effects, the music, and the really oversaturated and bright color palette, it's clear that this game is meant to be in the style of a long-lost GBA game, and really tries to channel the spirit of the sonic advance games.
the problem is it lacks gamepad support or really the ability to rebind your keys. Jump is mapped to SHIFT, which is extra cruddy because of course, you activate sticky keys all the dxamned time trying to rev up the spin dash. it's also buggy as hell... sonic gets a blue trail that follows him as a graphical effect when he moves really fast, but it kinda wiggs out and doens't properly track where he's coming from when you first pop into it... and there's also lots of collision errors and eventually it crashed, so...
Sonic World
This is better than it has any right to be, and it's still kinda atrocious and really just needs a team of QA guys. Sonic Worlds is a Unity powered cluster **** of 3D Sonic past, present, and future.There's a roster of 42 unlockable and playable characters. That's more Characters than were in the base game for Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, all with different attributes, abilities, voice acting, and techniques to help them get through the game's 58 stages, which all have 5 missions, and target S rank requirements... and pretty much, the stages are designed so any of these characters can get through them in some form or another!
In spite of my attempts to do so, I cannot seem to get the engine to just bug the **** out. the physics engine is usually pretty good about orienting you on a slope if you have the momentum to do so, and things don't feel as noodly as they do in the adventure games, but it's not like boost formula Sonic where you feel like you're controlling a car and not a platformer character. so far, I've only found one instance where I got caught in a spot they clearly missed in playtesting where i got stuck with a character who had an obnoxiously low jump height and I couldn't get out.
This game has a fully functioning Chao garden also.
that being said... the level design and enemy AI can be... hit or miss. some levels just SPAM enemies or are obnoxiously long. others are based on the level design from Sonic 3D blast, which was a game not menat to handle the speeds you can travel here. some levels are obnoxious to clear unless you're playing certain types of characters. also, all the boss fights and quite a few of the 'mach speed' style stages are obnoxiously difficult.
The devs here clearly seem to be focused on pushing quantity of content here, and not quality. I still however, find a perverse pleasure in playing Tiara Boobowski, Ray the Flying Squirrel, and Honey the Cat in a Sonic Heroes style team-up through Westopolis Zone from Shadow the Hedgehog.
I'll make a seperate post to talk about the non-sonic fangaming I've been doing once someone else posts.