Sonic Dash Comes to Windows

It's a sort of there for mobile but not quite. Microsoft has been pushing Xamarin's shit for iOS and Android development, where for the "low" price of $300 a year you have access to Xamarin.Forms which allows you to build one UI that tries to use native controls on each platform where possible. It works across iOS, Android and Windows Phone. For that case, it really is the same code for all platforms, just not the same binary.

I'm kind of biased against Xamarin though, because they basically took what used to be freely available for noncommercial development and paywalled it. I've used MonoMac for Mac ports of some open source stuff to provide native UI's, and a year or so back they decided to cut off development of that and try and force everyone over to their paid version of it. They took away the ability to generate "Bundled" versions of apps that would automatically strip down and include relevant portions of Mono inside an app so the entire Mono Runtime wouldn't need to be installed on a client to run the app, and forced you to use Xamarin.Mac for it. Likewise, the actual API support for MonoMac is practically frozen, leaving OSS developers forced to use derecated API's (like beginSheet at the application level which was deprecated in 10.9 instead of at the window level like it is now) just to do native development in C#. I don't have issues with them charging money to companies and people who sell products made with their toolkits, that makes sense, but I'm upset because they basically cut off those of us who develop free and/or open source stuff and want money for something that used to be free. Even Microsoft offers practically the full Visual Studio suite for non-commercical purposes for free now with the new community edition that they released recently.

This was a pretty big diversion from the discussion at hand, so...I'm glad to see they're at least porting mobile exclusive stuff to Windows Store. It means that perhaps they'd be open to doing this for other games if it goes well, like the ones from last year that everyone wants to see on more platforms?

 

This caught my curiosity enough to give it a go, since I have Windows 8.1 on this notebook. I'm really amazed how well it runs, and has decent keyboard mappings in place of the touch screen controls. It's a neat little Sonic game, so I'm keeping it.

What's really annoying is how many red rings it will take to unlock Amy or Blaze, but that's how they keep the game free to play. I can deal with using Mister Pine-Tree-With-Legs long enough to unlock them.

 

The problem with this game is how it progressed from first release, every character at some point was unlockable from events and if you played it at least every month you could unlock them.

now that the game has been out for around a year it's overwealming to unlock everything with rings.

The game is fun, doesn't feel any different on windows then it did on my phone, it's going to be a slow grind starting from scratch right now.

 

Unlocking through events sounds a lot less tiring, honestly. I'd guess the game is funded purely by impatient people that want two or three characters to play as. Still, the Red Rings system isn't too bad. I literally only wanted Blaze, so I played Dash a little every day until I got this :



She has a great in-game model, so I'm liking this game more now. What's really surprising me is that it has depth to it. Seriously, why haven't we been able to side-step on loops to collect rings and shields planted on them in the other games? This actually made loops interesting in the 3D space for once, you can do stuff on them. These weren't just scripted tubes.

Dash also caught me by surprise with having an enemy that couldn't be jumped on, or over. (At least not if you were right in front of it.) You specifically have to roll through one of them. This isn't half-bad for an stand-alone-special-stage-made-into-a-game deal.

 

Yeah, that enemy is Spikes, who got a Generations-esque redesign. I really want its model, to use as a reference for spriting, but uh... does anyone know how to un-bake Unity assets? :I

 

Wow, I didn't recognize him as that little enemy from Sonic 1; it's neat they put him in Generations too. Although I don't know anything about Unity, sadly.

Also, I don't know what's going on, but Silver was free when I looked at the shop today. So if anybody wants him, there's a chance it's not just me that can snag him for nothing. Now I have three characters to play as.

 

Yeah, it's not just you. Sega tweeted that Silver is going to be free for the holidays in Sonic Dash. If I hadn't already hacked enough red rings to get all the characters, I'd have gotten him.

 

I just saw that tweet a while ago, so I feel silly. :specialed:

How would you even cheat for Red Rings in Dash? Not that I need them anymore. I already have Blaze, Silver was a nice holiday bonus, and I'll probably save up anymore Red Rings I come across for Amy.

 

It involved messing with some files and some trickery with the roulette.

 

Sonic Dash just got a new update today on Android, which changes and streamlines the interface. It looks and works alot better IMO.

 

It's not a bad game at all, but it gets boring after a while. It's not as fun as Subway Surfers, but it's a nice alternative.
Also, I'm pretty sure it's previous versions had some serious optimization problems. It's framerate was low on my LG G3, and it's LG's flagship smartphone! Thankfully they fixed this problem in this version. Also, it work great on my PC too.

 

A PSA to anyone playing this on a Windows Phone: the game's most recent major update can cause multiple crashes, to the point where it will reset your progress (though not your ring or character count). Me and many others have been having this issue for a couple weeks now

 

Here's a better PSA: Sonic Dash is fairly unstable.



The basic summary is that I bought an upgrade. A simply thing, I purchased it. Well, then it just kicked me into the game, with a tipped-over skybox. What even... ?

Then that title screen. From there on, the game went insane and downhill. I could explain it all, but it's easier to just watch it.

 

Is that on the Blue Stacks emulator? The HUD doesn't look like the desktop version at all, and yet, I still see a mouse cursor flying around. :v:

That sucks either way. The weirdest thing I've seen is Blaze doing this on Windows 8. Never a crash or a derp in sight otherwise.

 

You must have an outdated version. It's the Windows 8 PC version, I assure you. Their latest update even mentions STUNNING NEW LOOK on the Windows Store page.