SAGE 2018 Booth Overviews: Set 5

Every day of SAGE, TSSZ will give you brief overviews of each booth’s amazing community content. Be sure to check back during the expo for more, and look out for Ryan Bloom giving each work a separate mini-review! You can play all games featured by heading to SAGE and clicking on the Games tab.

Kirby’s Dream Land Plus

There is an elevated amount of Kirby representation at this year’s SAGE, and this demo aims to recreate some of the franchise’s retro magic with a unique Game Boy palette and style. Though the demo is short by the creators’ own admission, you can still get a feel for what’s to come with a Hub world and the first level playable.

Lloyd the Monkey 2

It’s been a while since we visited this original franchise from MeyerGames. When Ryan reviewed the predecessor’s demo in 2016, he praised it for its platforming, especially given its original coding in Javascript. The sequel aims to improve on that formula, and the demo on display at SAGE affords players two of the finished product’s six stages, as well as a new gameplay mechanic mixing the best of Sonic Heroes, Final Fantasy, and Mega Man X.

JohnGagz

Original characters: What would the Sonic community do without them? Every so often they’ll appear in Sonic-themed fan games. JohnGagz is one such work. Still in its early stages, gameplay promises to fuse Sonic, Mario and Crash elements into one powerful package. Will it be successful? Despite its simplistic art style, early reviews of the work so far show some promise.

Sonic 3: Angel Island Revisited

Staking a growing presence at SAGE in recent years are mods, made more accessible through Sega’s willingness to allow tweaks via Steam. One of the more ambitious mods available this year is a work in progress that aims to faithfully bring the Sonic 3 & Knuckles experience to 16:9, with additional improvements like a Time Attack mode. Though it uses the Steam ROM, its heart is a custom script language intended to faithfully recreate the original game code.

Sonic Discovery

Another mod getting a lot of attention this year is based off Sonic Mania. Here, the goal is to afford the interested a playable form of what Mania looked like in beta, before its final form went gold. It has not been an easy road to the SAGE stage for developer Joe_Weigman_Pro, but if you give it a whirl, you’ll find plenty of unused objects and special item locations restored, including the infamous Dunkey mode.