SAGE ’09: Fangame Review Slew #4

With this article, I cash out on the last of the games I’ve been tasked to review – and once you read them all, you’ll know why this article contains reviews for 12 games but only 7 paragraphs. Rather than post five reviews in this article (as per usual) and still have two more reviews as the odd-men-out, I decided to put everything I had left to write about in to this one article. And though I may be done, Paul Street still has plenty of reviews of his own to post – so expect those in the coming days.

Sonic Gemini
DM Ashura and I go way back. He’s one of the primary brainchildren behind the Sonic Gemini project. He also was the one to suggest a method of player movement for my game that went on to power many Sonic fangames today. Thus, when this guy says he’s making a Sonic fangame, I stand up and take notice. Unfortunately, the Sonic Gemini Demo just wasn’t ready for prime-time. The initial release crawled along at a depressingly sluggish framerate, and though that was eventually fixed thanks to Damizean’s Grid Spatial Indexing GameMaker plugin, the demo is still quite clearly in a state of “Not all there”. What’s here definitely looks impressive and has potential, and there’s enough of it there to get a feel for switching between Sonic and Metal Sonic, but I’d feel bad if I was negative about an aspect of the game that was not yet implemented correctly. Here’s hoping we see a more complete version soon.

Sonic Mettrix/Megaman: Triple Threat
Like last year, these games are more of a tech demo for Stealth’s E02 engine. These releases come hot on the heels of news that E02 now works on the Playstation Portable and Nintendo Wii. Given the popularity of Damizean’s “Sonic Worlds” code-base, one would think that more people will start checking out what goes on under E02’s hood, now. Not only could fangame producers utilize some of the most pixel-perfect-accurate Sonic physics in all of fangaming, but they could do it on Windows, Mac, Linux, the Wii and PSP, all at the same time. Mettrix this year comes with a brand new level, “Bronze Lake Zone”, and it’s nice to finally see something besides the same Shining Isles level we’ve been seeing for years. Showing the range of E02, Megaman TT is just as accurate to the physics of the SNES Megaman games as Mettrix is to the physics of the Sega Genesis Sonic games, and I was genuinely disappointed that there wasn’t more of Triple Threat to play around with. With Taxman’s RSDK possibly never being released publicly and ProSonic playing catch-up, I really hope more people play around with E02, because it has the possibility to produce some amazing results (nudge nudge, Sonic Rebirth).

Sonic Whirlwind
If I wasn’t harsh on Sonic Gemini for being incomplete, I suppose I can’t be harsh on Sonic Whirlwind, either. The build at the expo is close to a month old and is basically an engine test for a Sonic-Unleashed-styled game. Perhaps more rough around the edges than anything else currently at SAGE, there’s not really much you can say about Sonic Whirlwind even in the context of an unfinished game. The “level” takes seconds to complete, is full of inactive enemies that don’t move or attack, and goes so over the top with its physics that I actually broke the game because I launched myself out of the level at one point. The demo also allows you to play as Shadow the Hedgehog, but only in the most limited sense: quite a large number of his animations are still just Sonic. Maybe it was not the wisest idea to show this game at SAGE in this state?

Sonic Zeta Overdrive
A lot of Sonic ROM hacks exist in this weird sort of alternate dimension, away from fangames. I’m not really familiar with the particulars of how hacking a Sonic ROM works, but I’ve opened SonED a few times to monkey around with making levels and I found the process to be more trouble than it was worth – sure, I’d have the Sega Genesis Sonic engine at my disposal, but as far as making tiles and placing them in the world, there are far easier methods than what is provided by doing a ROM hack (though, I can imagine ROM hackers saying the same thing about my methods, too). Maybe I don’t blame Zeta Overdrive, then, for having levels that feel sort of awkward to play – the first level is essentially a linear path suspended over a bottomless pit, for example. There are death pits placed in the first boss encounter with Dr. Eggman. Every now and then Tails gets caught in a glitch that causes him to constantly jump around like a maniac. Then there’s the fact that these types of ROM hacks were never exactly my cup of tea – which is why I don’t want to knock on Zeta Overdrive, because I know there’s an audience for this sort of thing, as I’ve seen it myself, and I have a vague working knowledge of the tools used to make something like this happen, so I can appreciate the work it took to get to this point. If you like Sonic 2 but want something a little bit different, give this beta a shot.

Sonic: Mecha Madness
Last year, Mecha Madness had me excited. Though usually the idea of combining RPG and brawler elements in Sonic games scare me, Mecha Madness was fun to play around with. Since then, its creator, Streak Thunderstorm, has had major setbacks and was forced to restart the game basically from scratch. This new version of Mecha Madness appears to be based on the Super Smash Brothers games more than anything related to Sonic, requiring you to double tap a direction to run, as well as providing charged Smash-attack like moves and a host of other features. Unfortunately, because of the game’s setbacks, there’s actually not much to the two demos besides a brief combat tutorial and an arena with some dummies to test out your abilities. Sonic also seems to accelerate extremely slowly – forcing you to use the “double tap to run” move to get anywhere, which already makes moving Sonic a chore to manage. Streak has told me that if you level up by defeating enemies your acceleration will improve, but forcing the player to level up just to make bad controls a little bit better doesn’t sound terribly appealing to me. I can’t really hold it against Mecha Madness for having such a lackluster showing this year considering what happened to the game, but like Sonic Whirlwind, I wonder if maybe Streak should have held off showing it this year until there was something more substantial…

Cooporationation
Not only is Cooperationation one of the few non-Sonic fangames we have at SAGE this year, it’s also pretty much the only game at SAGE this year starring original characters. As the name implies, the driving concept behind Cooperationation is teamwork. In a similar fashion to Sonic Gemini above, you are given control of a team of two characters which can be switched between at the touch of a button. Each character has specific abilities, but, unlike Sonic Gemini, Cooperationation requires you to manage the actions of both characters in order to complete a level. It’s an interesting concept, and one that begs to be explored more. Unfortunately, Cooperationation has a long way to go before it joins the ranks of games like The Lost Vikings. The game is lacking in almost every department: collision detection is spotty, characters move very slowly, gravity is perhaps a little too heavy, and what graphics aren’t borrowed from Super Mario All-Stars could use a considerable amount of touch-up. If these are issues that will be fixed (as is promised in the game’s readme), then I would be willing to pass this off as the playable equivilant to a “rough pencil sketch”. But until that better game emerges, I’m left to judge this demo on its current merits. The potential for what could be is great, but the game as it stands right now probably isn’t worth playing just yet. In the same breath, I give the creator an encouraging thumbs up and hope this game goes to cool places and does some cool things.

(Dis)honorable Mentions
If I didn’t talk about this last year, I’m going to talk about it this year, because this is a growing concern of mine: I’m getting increasingly wary of fangames made in GameMaker. This SAGE we have not just one, or two, or even three fangames that refuse to work on my computer – we have four total fangames that instantly crash upon opening them, and all four of them are made in GameMaker. Project Darkness, Sonic Adventure 3, Sonic the Gizoid, and Sonic Universe Adventure all immediately terminate with the same vague “An unexpected error occurred when running the game” message. I know that some will testify that GameMaker is a more powerful game creation tool than Multimedia Fusion, but I’ve had more problems correctly running GameMaker-created games than I have ever had running any fangame made in anything else. This extends beyond the confines of SAGE, as well – for years I’ve had problems running certain GM-created games, such as Mario-uber-fangame “Mushroom Kingdom Fusion”. These GameMaker glitches obviously don’t happen for the people who created the games in question – and therein lies the problem with GM-created games: sometimes, GameMaker just “doesn’t like” certain people. Somehow, a snippet of code or a calculation just executes in different ways depending on what kind of computer you’re using – and over the last four or so years, asking around for an explanation as to why this happens has resulted in many theories, but no actual answers. So while I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who can play Sonic Adventure 3, I cannot, which makes it a little difficult to write a review about it. Some would lay the blame on the people who made the games, but I lay the blame squarely on GameMaker itself. Unless a concrete reason can be found as to why a GameMaker-created game will work for one guy but not the other, I sincerely implore everybody to find something else to make games in – I hear Damizean might be porting Sonic Worlds to the “Construct” engine…