http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1iY05PkDJY 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 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: 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: 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.
Thank you kindly good sir. I can abuse the Unleashed mod with speed shoe items and Super Sonic for modern Sonic and still rarely get S ranks. A challenge is nice, but a little wiggle room isn't an issue. I always liked Unleashed's ranking system as it gave you points for multiple things, so even if you didn't go through the level super quick, if you did other stuff you'd still get a good rank (although sometimes if you did go super quick and ignored stuff you'd get a lesser rank, which is also problematic). I'm guessing since this mod aims to bring back a scoring system which is impossible to convert it's likely a happy medium of sorts in between the Unleashed projects Super Hard mode and Generations "you can do an unspeed run and still get a rank S" mode (although oddly the challenges were ranked slightly harder). I can't wait to give this a whirl.
