Sonic Fan Games (The older ones)

Aha!! Sonic and Silver Sonic! That was the game I was talking about. I haven't set eyes on it in a decade! Just played through the whole thing... the writing is comically bad even for a fangame.

Heh, this kinda makes me want to break out MMF and make something in the style of the old days.

 

c:\windows\system32 - just throw'em in there.

 

You will find sticking the dll files in the same directory as the game also works if you don't want to place them in your system32 folders.

 

Thank you for the nostalgia, PC0! These games really take me back to when I first joined the community around a decade ago. Some of my favourites were Knuckles Millennium, Sonic Chaos, Sonic/Rotor Boom, Dr. Robotnik's Rebellion, Knuckles Blast, Sonic Y2K and When Tails Gets Bored (though I never made it past the "darkness" level).

Being part of a separate Tails community way back then we had our own favourites, such as those created by Magnus Andersson. The Tails Quests and Tails Race were very popular, though my many attempts at a "Tails Adventure" never came into fruition. I did manage to release some fangames - I was part of a team who made Knuckles Adventure 1 and 2 in 2002, anyone remember those?

What a great idea! Maybe a full-blown genre of "KNP-likes" could be started, with simpler graphics, music and physics, all designed to be nostalgic yet still playable. I know Slingerland organises an annual "RAGE" contest in this style, but those are deliberately unplayable (yet still weirdly enjoyable).

 

Speaking of which...
http://pc0.sepwich.com/SFG/Museum/Sprites/
The original SFGHQ Sprites page in all it's glory, fully functional including the ability to download any and all of the sprites listed. This is older than shit and many of the formats are in cca so keep that in mind.

The newer .cca entries in that database which are made in MMF can be easily converted using this tool written by Smidge204 himself:
http://pc0.sepwich.com/SFG/Museum/CCARip_v1.7.zip

Older cca made in CnC and TGF however will not covert unfortunately. =/

Either way, have fun with that guys, if this proves popular as well I may add more old SFGHQ content.

 

You're a legend. I never understood why SFGHQ decided to halve its game library.

I'd been wanting to play Sonic Groove for a while to see if it was still as cool as it was back in 2004-ish. Like I suspected, it's not, but it's nice to have that assurance. Still nifty though.

 

We got hacked and basically had to rebuild shit from scratch. Eventually the plan was to do this with an all new website but due to a variety of technical problems and what with the "bar of quality" raising for fan games, a lot of stuff never made it back in. At the time, there wasn't a real big demand for these old "nostalgia" games, since well, they weren't THAT old at the time. One of the big demands from a lot of people in the community were incentives to get people to "Finish their games". Many felt that the "big problem" with the community at the time was that demos were allowed on the site, so people would simply start a project, get half way and never finish it. Because of the demand to stop accepting demos, when we remade the site, we simply didn't include a demos section. At the time this seemed like a great idea and frankly, it worked somewhat for a short while but eventually the effectiveness of such a change became somewhat questionable.


Was it a mistake to change things that way? Maybe, though I can't really say for sure, but it certainly seemed like the right way to go at the time. That combined with the constant insistence that certain pieces of content weren't good enough for "today's fan games" , old format issues and the insurmountably huge task of trying to add the outrageously large amount of content from the old SFGHQ (we're talking several thousand entries into a variety of categories from games, music, sounds, tutorials and sprites), a lot of stuff simply never made it back onto the site sadly.


That's the short story, but there's a lot of other complex details that were involved in it as well, so while there's more to it than that, it'd take too long to tell and to be honest, I'm not even sure my view point/understanding of it all is 100% accurate simply because 6 years is a long ass time.

 

I was ready to have a nostalgia blast, but I can't get any of the fan games to work on Windows 7 64bit. What a bummer.

But oh man, the sprites section. I remember looking for sprites and then getting .cca and .gam files, being completely clueless about what to do with them.

 

wow I made 4 sprite packs for sonic, forgot about most of them.

 

I'll check some of these out. I still recall the very first Sonic fangame I played, it was pretty much just a small Green Grove Zone field from Sonic 3D Blast and you had to collect all of the...something. And it played some very cheap MIDI of some popular song from the 90's, think it was that one that goes "Hey now, you're a rockstar, blah blah blah"..whatever.

It's a shame SFGHQ doesn't even archive all of their submissions throughout the years. As crappy as most of this stuff is, it is their history after all =P

I got a couple requests too. First is Sonic Fusion, which someone else mentioned earlier. It was going to be a racing game made in DarkBASIC. I still remember the violin music that played, even messaged the creator(who even sent me more current, at the time, build of the game that made me incredibly underwhelmed) and even couldn't identify the song, so I'd love if someone else could. There was also another oddity that I think went by the name Sonic Brazillian. It was just weird, which made it cool. I'd also like to remember who made that one and what else he did, since I seem to remember him having other interesting projects in the works.

 

Sonic 3D 2. It was the first game me and a mate of mine downloaded from Sonic Fan Games. The second was Sonic: The Fast Revelation. This would have been somewhere around the time the Time Attacked demo was released. In retrospect, I probably have you and Jamie Bailey to thank for me getting into the fanscene in the first place.

 

Some simple searching brought up a link for the Sonic Fusion demo I remember being sent by Raudaschl. Had to use archive.org since it's a long dead site though, but surprisingly it saved the zip file.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070304091428/...ar.co.uk/sf.zip

It's sad that I've yet to see any released 3D Sonic fan games that really are any better than this to this day =P Now if someone could find that previous Fusion demo where you run around a city...

 

Makes sense

though the problem I always had was that many of SFGHQ's best content was hosted in the demos section. Though the games weren't "complete" they were usually more up-to-date and more refined than their full game counterparts. Full games had a tendancy to be rushed, old or just flat-out bad before the days when decent engines were the norm. Also seeing as Sonic fangames still aren't completed very often I don't think axing the section made much a difference. Though granted, this was a long time ago now.

And it's all based on the fact I run MFGG in my spare time and we do exactly the same thing (but for Mario). We've been accepting and hosting the same types of stuff since 2001, clocking up nearly 25000 submissions in that time. Just a bit of a shame that SFGHQ, which came first, stopped after a thousand or two.

 

Well it's certainly awesome to hear someone from a similar scene's input on it. I also agree with your point on fan games still not being completed very often. It did make a difference right around when the demos section was first axed I think, simply because there was a "buzz" about that happening, but once people stopped giving a shit about that, it really did cut down on the submissions over all, so I imagine in the long run it wasn't an ideal decision. As for submissions in general, we haven't stopped, we're still adding stuff all the time, though there was a bit of a hiatus when our old submissions retainer disappeared without so much of a word and we got a big back log of stuff as a result because we relied too much on him perhaps. Once we hired a new one though we've started to get that backlog clearing out again and more content back up on the site.

Sadly one of the problems on the Sonic side of things is that ever since SEGA started releasing less than ideal Sonic games after 2000 (or whenever, depends on who you ask, not here to argue that), a lot of people lost interest in Sonic fan gaming as the entire Sonic internet community itself entered a decline. I mean let's face it, the SiC is still going strong but it's not the sheer massive size it used to be way back when. Then when SFGHQ got hacked and we were more or less out of commission for a pretty long time, we took a rather bad hit population and morale wise as a result of that. One of the reasons I'm so excited to be working with Retro is that a revival in the interest of Sonic Fan Gaming is looking quite probable. Retro already has some amazing projects of it's own going and SFGHQ is glad to have a chance to be part of that. Fan gaming itself, at least in the Sonic community, is looking like it's on it's way to becoming a lot more popular again, with all of us working as a team, so I really can't wait to see what the future holds as far as that goes. Who knows, maybe SFGHQ/Retro's new partnership will catch up to your submissions at some point!

Speaking of team ups, maybe SFGHQ can work out some interesting stuff with MFGG as well (Some contests or some kinda cool stuff like that who knows, possibilities are endless) at some point, we should discuss that some time!

 

I've just dug out my old PC from years ago from the attic and will be removing the hard drive (before junking the machine). There's a good chance there might be some rare fangaming gems on it (I know Sir Euan sent me some old engine tests for XG over AIM circa 2001 but I wouldn't upload those as they're private and I don't think they were released publicly), there might be some old crap I tried to make back then on there! :P

 

God damn this takes me back so much.

I have about 10 ZIP disks, many of which filled with old SFGHQ games, demos, and libs... why did I have to lose the cable to the USB zip drive I had? >_<


I remember one I fan game [I think it was a rather big demo] I liked fiddling around in a LOT - Knux CD [Knuckles CD]. I have been looking for it for years, and nobody seems to have it [though many remember it]... I wish the Internet Archive was actually GOOD at saving the downloadable content of a website. >_<

God, I remember early 2001 / 2002 circa SFGHQ.


Ahhh, major nostalgia bomb with the MIDIs used.

EDIT: OMFG Sonic Bible Adventure.... >_< I remember this monstrosity!

 

What you need(ed) to do is get yourself a proper resource management system, rather than rely on one or two people to handle every submission possible. Though I agree that the userbase may have been damaged by poor ideas from Sega, there's still been at least one or two Sonic games per year since Sega moved out of the hardware business, so there's still a constant supply of content to be ripped for fangame usage, if nothing else.

MFGG's site is based entirely around a site content management system, so we have a team of staff members who can log in and access a queue of submissions which haven't yet been approved for public viewing. Decisions and updates can then be done quickly and easily online and hence we're able to get a hundred or so pieces of content out a month (even though the site was built for the internet users of 2006 and therefore looks like ass on the large monitors of today).

But we are in the process of overhauling our content management system and I'd certainly support handing a copy to SFGHQ if there's still a need once it's complete. Having said that though it is currently a case of one man doing most of the work so I can't provide an estimated time of arrival on that one. And I suspect it would take a while to manually upload everything SFGHQ hosts onto the new system. But certainly worth it in the long-run.

I'm more than happy to team up with SFGHQ. It's about time the two halves were brought together!