Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: BlazeHedgehog - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

I recently purchased an Ez-Flash IV. I'm struggling a bit with it (less games work on it than I expected), but that's not really what this thread is about. Instead, I'm looking for a specific version of Sonic Advance that I'm pretty sure I got from here many, many, many years ago. Somebody was fed up at the poor sound quality of the Gameboy Advance and Sonic Advance's "realistic" instrument samples and hacked the game to replace them all with what they defined as "high quality studio synths".

It was kind of cool, and I hung on to it for a long time, but in the decade or more since downloading it I appear to no longer have it, and it was apparently never archived on the wiki or anywhere else.

Does anyone even remotely know what I'm talking about?

Download and further information is over here.

Guess_Who said he'd suspend anyone who brought the subject up again, so I checked in with him before posting this.

So, yeah. Here it is. The mod that re-balances the S-Rank scores from The Unleashed Project to be more like they were in the original Sonic Unleashed. I recall a post from Dario saying something like

Dario FF, on 21 March 2013 - 12:55 AM, said:

And it just never happened. I'd boot up The Unleashed Project, play a level or two, get told I was 30 seconds too slow, and quit. In my mind, it was still bullshit. The best I could muster was never fast enough for The Unleashed Project. Even after I stopped and tried to think about where I could take further shortcuts, it only ever shaved off two or three seconds - never the 15-20+ seconds it was asking from me.

That in itself is part of the problem: I talk a lot about my skill level, when that's always fed in to a much larger view of mine. I use my own experience as a reference point for something I've always considered to be the "larger picture". I try and think of things like a game developer; I'm always trying to feel out what the audience at large wants. I've been making games in some form for 15 years now, and try to apply the lessons I've learned to everything I can. And the universal lesson nobody seems to have learned very well is how hard is too hard.

This is most likely a result of it being a measurement of one's "skill". Being skilled at something is an addictive feeling, something nobody wants to give up. Indeed, some of the motivation for this mod is because it's something I didn't want to give up. Whether you realize it or not, even though it is a place that gave birth to The Unleashed Project, the opinions of people who post at Sonic Retro are small potatoes. It is obviously going to be the most hardcore heart of this mod, and of course they're going to be up to an extended challenge. That's just how it is.

There was something I wrote on Tumblr a few days ago about this:

Quote

That taught me a lesson I won't soon forget. Since then, I've always tried to think beyond "hardcore". Beyond Sonic Retro, beyond the modding community, beyond the niche - I've tried to think about it in terms of The Mainstream™. You can tell me that the mainstream is shit, full of idiots, etc. and I won't entirely disagree with you - but that does not mean you should completely hide yourself from their view. Everything in moderation - and a little extra mainstream appeal isn't going to kill you.

This is primarily because I really love Sonic Unleashed's levels, and I'd like to show other people why I love it. It's hard to do that when I have to attach the caveat of explaining why the score ranking is skewed in favor of ultra-hardcore difficulty. And that kind of sucks. Not just for me, but for a lot of people that don't post at Sonic Retro.

Anyway, if you have any feed back on my changes, I'd be glad to hear them. As I mention in the Moddb post:

Quote

Meaning it may still be "wrong". If I get enough feedback that something is still too hard, I'll consider a second release - though I don't expect most people from Sonic Retro will be interested.

So talking to a friend on IRC and they were like "Hey did you know Blaze the Cat was the original design for Shadow the Hedgehog" and I was like "What". I get handed this link which is already setting off warning bells: http://sonic.wikia.c...the_Cat/Artwork

The artwork in question are these two images, which allege to be a "prototype design" for Blaze the Cat made for Sonic Adventure 2



I skimmed Sonic Wrecks, saw nothing about this artwork. So what's the scoop? Where is this artwork actually from? Anybody know? My bullshit-o-meter is going off something fierce.

With talk of Sonic Generations getting Mario Galaxy levels I decided it was probably time I stop hoarding these for myself like an asshole and post them up for download.

The original video description follows:

angelXwind, on 29 April 2012 - 01:56 AM, said:

This is my first time using Dropbox so hopefully I did this right. Somewhere in the back of my mind I keep saying, "I should have gotten Damizean's permission" but considering they're just ports it's probably not a huge deal? I give him all the credit, too.

If I sound cold in the video description, my apologies; I just don't want to play tech support to a bunch of kids asking dumb questions. That's less of a problem here, since we have a lot of the original creators for this stuff active

http://blaze.letsvid...er_4-1-2012.rar (18.1mb)

https://mega.co.nz/#...bGdrMCWQ-03tews SonicForever_2015_Beta.7z (19mb)

Obviously, the boss isn't done. I have concept art sketched out, but it's just a matter of finding time to implement him. I really need to get off my ass and do more on this game, really, but I've had other commitments that have come first.