Recently my desktop backgrounds have been feeling a bit stale. For the last couple years I've been using a rotation of background scenery and/or the nice title cards from Adventure Time, because I like logging onto my computer and feeling like I've entered a world I know and love. But that has worn thin, and I thought "hey, Sonic games have a lot of great environments!" and decided I'd go on a hunt for good Sonic screens to use as my desktop. I thought I'd log the search here because I think it'd get me some help, and because I want to share what I DO have with others. Here's an album of everything I've gathered so far. So what's the issue with this? Simple. Sonic games tend to feature characters, and UI. I don't want that on my desktop. They also have a tendency to be released before 2006, meaning that their resolution can leave something to be desired, even in 2D. You can see I've got some Sonic Advance backgrounds there, and while I think expanding the literal size of each screen is a bit much to ask, you can see that the size isn't gonna upscale well if I can't set it to clean nearest neighbor filtering (which is ironic, because for OTHER images, I'd want bilinear filtering!). So if anyone knows any good batch-scaling options to make those pixels crispy at a 1080 resolution, I'm all ears. This thread is mostly just about whatever ingame scenery (or I guess game CG works fine too) you happen to like or would use as a desktop background, but I'd love it if anyone has screenshots with no HUD and no characters in shot, maybe using one of those freecam mods. As you can see, I've got the classic games covered, along with SA1 and a good chunk of Heroes and Forces, but everything else is up in the air. SA2 would be great, as would more Heroes and any of the games since Sonic Unleashed. I'm sure there's some cool-looking stuff in Shadow and 06. I also have no idea which of these games have freecam mods and how well they function. Oh, also, I'm aware of http://noclip.website, which does allegedly have Sonic Colors, but I couldn't get it to work for some reason, so if those screenshots are gonna be taken, it won't be by me. And there we have it! What are your prettiest Sonic landscape shots? The kind you'd want to wake up every day and see as your desktop!
I actually have taken a few photos of the scenery in Generations and Unleashed before! Retro has a filesize limit, so here's the Imgur link: https://imgur.com/a/Zybkiqe I would have taken more of Unleashed, but there aren't any mods for the 360 version that disable the night HUD, which sucks because those stages can be really pretty at times. Oh well. Now that we're on this topic, I kinda want to go take some photos of 06 because I'm a huge fan of that game's environmental style. Maybe I'll do that if there are working mods for that purpose.
Hey, those are perfect! I'm especially glad to have that last Skyscraper Scamper image, seeing environments at different angles is awesome.
Update: I took a bunch of pictures of 06's environments as I said I would. https://imgur.com/a/DpDzk9N Doing this has really heightened my appreciation for 06's visuals... The game blends together staunch realism with more fantastical Sonic elements like loops and hills in such an elegant way. Truly a beautiful game.
Beautiful stuff you two! I'd like to share two of mine: From the Sonic Frontiers Game Awards trailer: From the Sonic streams:
Update! Turns out Irfanview can batch-upscale stuff. Here is an album of all those low-quality backgrounds, now at 1080 quality. I suppose anyone with a 4k screen might be dissatisfied with these, but I'm happy now. Just kidding, here's a bunch more stuff. I finally built up a good repertoire of Colors and Generations...though I think some of these are actually mods. Still, they looked convincing enough to fool me! EDIT: And hey, here's a Frontillion more. It's occurring to me that outside of Shadow the hedgehog and maybe Adventure 2, most of the main games really do have plenty of nice environment shots online.
