Sonic Dream Team (New 3D Game from Hardlight, coming to Apple Arcade December 5)

It's mainly the subscription service part that has everyone wired up.
I'm sure there are those that would probably still been pissed if it was properly released but as a MacOS only title.

 

I get the subscription hate. Fair enough on that part. Also, the game’s graphics don’t seem to take that much advantage of the hardware to justify mac/ios-only. They could do much better.

 

It's mainly a "Apple actually paid for the development of this game and thus it's an exclusive" deal

 

The worst part of this game is definitely the "impossible to own and possibly going to become lost media" part, but the second worst part is that you can't emulate Apple's tech. If this were exclusive to any other platform shy of streaming-only games (burn in hell Stadia), then all roads lead to Windows and Linux like usual, it would just be a bit of a wait (and who knows, maybe we can get there with Apple, but I'm not confident). But the best-case scenario for this now is being reconstructed from the ground up by fans, which will still be a massive pain in the dick when the game is so technologically closed-off and large parts need to be remade from scratch. It's only going to get worse once the game exists only in video with the devs themselves rendered unable to run it.

I dunno, I just feel like it's weird to characterize "this should be accessible by PCs like the other overwhelming majority of all media ever released by this franchise" as more selfish than foisting upon fans the responsibility of all that work to preserve a mere imitation of the game. You can call it whining if you want, but it never had to be like this.

 

Won't become the latter no matter what happens

 

Okay, go emulate an Apple Arcade game right now then. Do it, if it's that easy.

 

So I did look into this at the most surface level and emulating with a virtual machine might be an option? Of course, that's a pretty high barrier to entry for most people and we shouldn't need to be doing that but, if it is accessible in such a way and the game is running in something like Unity, I expect the more dedicated, technologically savvy fans will have something akin to a decomp out in the wild within a year of release, tops. In fact, I think the 1/2/CD decomps can be set up using a tampered iPhone, which I don't think is too uncommon, so such people probably wouldn't even need to go through the hassle of a VM.

 

I think it looks terrible personally. The art style is hideous. But, hopefully it plays well.

 

Okay, so my understanding of the emulation problem is that iOS doesn't have any kind of emulator, but Mac's virtual machines do. The problem is that you can't use hardware acceleration with it due to not being able to emulate the architecture its built on, meaning that some games (I assume these ones with complex 3D graphics) won't work. Windows VMs are basically perfect because Microsoft supports it themselves, but Apple pretty obviously wants the exact opposite of this.

I was then going to remark that Sonic Racing would be a good litmus test for this, since it's the same dev on the same service, but you can't download it!

Except...you can? I took a shot on the internet archive, and there's an archive of every Mac Apple Arcade game there??? I'm probably not good to link it here, but it includes Sonic Racing. So assuming whatever was used to rip that still works by the end of the year, it sounds like the game can be backed up in some form. I dunno if there's a secret to Mac architecture on a VM that we've yet to find or if you can hack together a Mac install just to play the game like this, but it looks like they haven't got as tight a hold on the game as I maybe thought (though I still don't like it).

 

I just searched and found some Reddit thread regarding cracking Apple Arcade titles. I don't know if it's still accurate, and to my understanding it still requires an Apple device (jailbroken, in this instance), but I'm not pessimistic about the chances a Sonic fan will figure out how to preserve this thing. And like @Starduster said, a Sonic fan will surely find a way to break it open and have a solution ready for if/when this thing becomes unavailable through official means.

 

Well, I had no idea that it could apparently be fully downloaded on its own. I thought being part of AA's subscription was a form of online-only DRM. If you can just download the apps, it almost makes the subscription feel silly.

It's still not good, but it's a lot easier if it's just some file people can download and poke around in. We already have fucktons of fanmade frameworks, this seems like a great opportunity to finally put something in them.

Poking around taking some very cursory glances tells me that there might be a way to make a Mac VM use your GPU via PCIE passthrough, but this stuff is way beyond me. Most of the results I get when looking up Virtual Mac hardware acceleration are for virtual machines on Apple devices rather than VMs of the Mac OS itself, so I'm not 100% sure what I'm looking at from moment to moment.

A lot of AA-specific threads seem to recommend "hackintoshing", installing Mac OS on non-Apple hardware. I don't really want it to come to that for a whole two games, but I suppose I'm not using my other SSD for much right now...assuming I can even keep it all on two drives like that.

 

That's how quarter pipes and half pipes functioned in the classics, so I'd agree that it's an obvious type of terrain to mix with Sonic's style of movement. For some reason it has indeed turned out to be asking a little too much of Sonic Team.

This is exactly the kind of shit that my fellow Classic Sonic Elitists™ and I want from the 3D games, which is what makes it sad that it's not at least on PC. It could be a PS5 exclusive or an Xbox Series X Box Series X exclusive and I'd still be disappointed. Honestly, given that the game only exists because Apple funded it, my ire's directed more at Sega and Sonic Team; why won't you guys fund something like this already? I can still get my fix for this kind of thing with 3D fangames, but it'd be nice to have it happen officially and get a wide release, you know?

But you're right; it looks good, but could still play bad. If it plays bad, then I guess I won't be disappointed after all.

 

Looking forward to this. Unlike Sonic Superstars on my laptop, it won’t be clunky on my iPhone and Mac Mini!

 

According to PCGamingWiki, each install of the Mac App Store is tied to an Apple ID, so there's a bit more work to it. I don't know the exact method to switch out the ID, but I do know that there's also a flag in the info.plist file inside every Mac app called NSApplicationRequiresArcade that toggles the Apple Arcade requirement.

 

You can pirate apple arcade games on mac, piracy and emulation are not the same thing.

Wont go into the exact details here though since I'm pretty sure the mods would have my head on a pike if i did :p

 

Tiny bit of new gameplay.

 

Still looks great!

 

Ok the main sonic render they're using is really bugging me and I found out why. The flat white teeth square is just ugly, come on sega give him his fangs back. Also doesn't help that his expression doesn't have much 'tude it's wayyy too "corporate mascot" for my liking.

 

Why does it seem like it's saying that Sonic and Amy are the star's of the show? Also, in another tweet, Cream apparently needs to be rescued?
What's going on with the story?

 

Can you elaborate? I don't remember Sonic ever having fangs...