Blaze The Cat in Sonic the Hedgehog 1 is... well, a hack that puts Blaze the Cat in Sonic 1. To be more specific, it changes all the sprites and adds a couple new abilities and other nice things. Spoiler: Abilities Blaze is able to use some abilities in mid-air, like so: A/B/C + Up: Axel Tornado - Similar to how it works in Sonic Rush Adventure, Blaze shoots upwards (retaining side velocity), damaging everything on the way up. Be careful, though, you become vulnerable on the way down! A/B/C + Left/Right: Air Dash - Your standard air dash, but you uncurl so be careful and avoid landing on enemies. It gets significantly faster with the speed shoes! A/B/C + Down: Flame Stomp - Cancels all your side velocity and sends you flying downwards, breaking enemies and monitors on the way down without bouncing! Very situational, but landing on strong slopes with this grants you a lot of velocity very quickly (Star Light Zone is where you'll see this the most) Additionally, if you're in mid-air and not curled into a ball (and haven't used up your air ability), you can perform the Air Roll just by pressing A/B/C, which will make Blaze curl into a ball and allow you to use any of your air abilities. Spoiler: Other Features -Blaze talks! Well, only a little. She says "You can't escape me!" when starting a level, and a couple more sounds. Hold C+Start when starting a new game to disable this. -DAC music for the level clear theme. -Fixed Press Start Button text, because that's a feature every hack needs (okay maybe not, but I like it)! Plus, some other minor bugfixes. Spoiler: Screenshots Spoiler: Known Issues -Sometimes the air dash goes in the right direction, but Blaze's sprite is facing the other way. -Every now and then, the stomp doesn't break monitors, so you have to jump again. No idea what causes this. -SYZ bumpers spawn flame particles. This is because I hijacked the points object for the flames, but forgot to stop the bumpers from spawning them. Oops. -Not exactly a bug or anything but some sprites aren't in, namely the ending sequence ones (this is the biggest reason I numbered this version v0.9). All others are practically complete. This hack will no longer be updated. Please keep that in mind. Oh and yeah, this is my very first hack. It's been fun doing all this! Some credits go to: -Everyone involved in the Git disassembly -kirjavascript for the excellent Flex 2 MD graphics editor. -Xenowhirl for SonMapEd, a very good small MD graphics editor, used for some sprites. -Cylent Nite and .Luke for the Blaze spritesheet. -E-122-Psi for providing the base art and complete object code for the title screen banner.
...the title screen is part of Blaze's spritesheet tho right? The one that's credited to Cylent Nite and .Luke, I mean.
Quite frankly, very well made. Unfortunately, I've never played Rush, so thanks for the trivia on the Axel Tornado. Gameplay wise, good. Keep up the good work, and hope you fix those bugs~
The hack is pretty good. The better mid-air control makes this stand out over other character hacks, and the fire particle effects are a nice touch. The only real issue I have is the voice sample, it gets repetitive after a while...
Thanks for the feedback, guys! You're right, I should add a way to disable it. Let me see what can I do.
Speaking of using PCM, I believe putting it over the zone's music makes it fuzzy to hear. Maybe add the PCM before the title cards fly in. I think other Mega Drive games have done that, IIRC. Also, I see that you're using MegaPCM. There is a tutorial to optimize playback. Have you tried that, yet? Try and see if you can sort it out by the next update. But so far, I'm seeing that this hack has a lot of potential!
Heck, I even tried again twice yesterday, and same issue again. I really can't believe I'm dumb enough to make the same mistake every single time, I'm starting to think the guide may have a problem. Thanks for the feedback, though! I can't really hear much of a difference with or without other audio playing, it doesn't sound any worse to me, but it's something I wanna try after finally getting that guide to work.
Can confirm it does that for me too, even though I follow the guide exactly. The thing is, Step 4 works for me, Step 2 doesn't. No matter which disasm. It either breaks the DAC playback or ends in a black screen. UPDATE: FOUND THE ISSUE. YOU also have to remove the loop right after the first instruction in Step 2. That is all.
So as a sort of update on where this hack ended up. I actually did find the original spritesheet for all the Mobius Evolution Blaze sprites, including two sprites for the ending, posted on the original author's DeviantArt with permission for reuse of course. Planned on adding that, fixing the rest of the misalignments and then putting up a new final build with all the other requested changes. Sadly, I lost the source after a hard drive crash last year. None of the code in the hack was particularly difficult to do or anything, most of the tedious work was simply all the sprites that had to be put in. At some point later on I might redo the hack again and finally put up the final build here. Sorry for the silence! Would've made more sense to post this when that happened.
Final update in! Not a huge update, but just some minor fixes and polish. I didn't recover the source, however I did find that I copied a ROM to my Xbox 360, containing most of the changes I made before the HDD crash. From what I can tell and remember, the changes are as follows: Added "Blaze the Cat in" banner to the title screen. Thanks to @E-122-Psi for providing the full code and base art. Added the ability to disable Blaze's starting voice line by starting a game holding C+Start. Improved DAC sample playback quality (by a little bit). Fixed some other bugs. Probably. I think. Not sure exactly how close to the last changes I did this is. And that's about it. This probably won't receive any updates anymore, short of redoing the entire hack, but I have other things I want to do and less free time now so that's unlikely. And yes, I recognize this honestly isn't a great hack. I could've handled the palette better than this, I could've not replaced the points object and instead did the flame particles as a new one, I could've added the rest of the sprites before posting... but it was my first hack and a worthwhile learning experience. I have a couple more hacks I want to do, particularly for Sonic 2, so this isn't the last either. I want that to be open source and up on my Github, so I don't lose all the progress yet again :p (and so other people can learn and maybe add features and such).
