Sonic ERaZor 7

Rambling podcast-style over the biggest changes for the upcoming update!

Spoiler: Video script, in case you don't want to listen to some German's thick af accent for ten minutes

So, looks like that trailer had quite a bit more reach than I anticipated. Thank you! Because that video was a little short, this time I will be more in-depth about what you can expect from ERaZor 7.

First off, some backstory. Ahem. Stop me if you've heard this one before: "Final version of Sonic ERaZor."

Yeah, we're beating that dead horse once again, though this time it's at least been a while – 8 years since the last release, to be precise. Don't get me wrong, I really do mean I originally had no plans to work on it again. Hell, I even made the source code public. But then something happened to finally make me break my oath – that's right, redhotsonic happened. If you don’t know what I mean, watch my video explaining the bug about the unavoidable hard crash if the game ran without SRAM.

I was really hesitant though. After all, eight years since "finishing" something is quite a long time to pass. So I made a YouTube poll asking how people would feel about reviving a game this old, and to my surprise, the response was overwhelmingly positive in favor towards reviving it. So I got working.

But between almost a decade passing, me calling the last release "Fulfilled Edition", and not to mention said release being the THIRD time I released an update to ERaZor marketed as "the final one", I didn't want to release a new version only containing a single bug fix, especially one that most people wouldn't even experience because who the hell plays without save functionality. One thing led to another and suddenly this revival grew into its own beast.



So the biggest and most important question first, what the hell even IS this update? Because it's actually quite a unique situation compared to the previous six versions. Those were always small incremental changes and bugfixes, while keeping the overall core experience of the game unchanged.

This time, things were different, because I didn’t just randomly add stuff I thought was cool, I actively thought about what actually NEEDED to be changed. This mostly came from lessons learned through watching many, many people play the game over the last eight years, mostly through YouTube videos.

How was that accomplished? By doing A COMPLETE OVERHAUL. And by complete, I MEAN complete. Literally every single frame you will see from the moment you boot up the game to the last second of the credits screen has been looked at, reevaluated, and then in most cases been edited. Sometimes it was just adding some cool bells and whistles, but for the most part it was a major rethinking of the underlying game design itself. Unfortunately, this makes it pretty difficult to give a concise list of everything that’s changed, because the biggest change is much rather an adjustment to the philosophy of the game itself.

I will structure this video by first going through some of the general things that have changed, and then I will talk more in detail about what the philosophy change is about.

So, let’s get started with the highlights:

First of all because it inspired this whole update in the first place: Full compatibility with real hardware! Yes, even without SRAM.

There’s basically nothing left of the old Sonic 1 engine. It all got replaced by modern methods that made the game run insanely smooth and got rid of a lot of ERaZor’s infamous slowdowns. In a nutshell, ERaZor 7 has blast processing, ERaZor 6 doesn’t. I want to give a huge shout out to vladikcomper, who made all of this possible! He was also kind enough to implement his amazing MegaPCM 2 sound driver to replace the pretty outdated one ERaZor had before. Not only fixed this many audio quirks, at also gave the entire soundtrack a fresh vibe!

Added tons of cool new stuff. No new levels because that wasn’t the focus of this update, but still a lot of expansions to the existing ones. I can’t really say much without spoiling anything, but one sweet thing I already can show you is the new trophy gallery in Uberhub Place to add a bit of personality to the stages and the hub world, but also to remember how far you’ve already come!

Reworked every. Single. Level. Some more, some less, but all in some significant way. The least changed level is Night Hill Place, the most changed one I can’t even tell you because honestly, I don’t even know that myself anymore. It’s best you do a side-by-side comparison to ERaZor 6 or something. Either way, the specifics don’t matter, you can definitely feel the improvements just by playing through the game.

Completely rewrote the cinematic black bars from scratch to be a lot more flexible. Originally this was just meant to be a small visual touch-up, but this newfound flexibility even led to some new gameplay stuff being themed around them. One day I will give you the full story behind the process of rewriting these black bars, because man was it a ride…

Everything text-related received a major visual overhaul, but more importantly a total rewrite. The quote-on-quote “story” of ERaZor is an iconic part of the game, but oh my god did some of the texts age terribly. I still cringe whenever some YouTuber reads them out loud. Plus, there’s so much god damn text in the tutorial. Six pages to tell you how to double jump. This time I think I finally hit the perfect balance between informative and entertaining, while also not overstaying its welcome. But of course, that’s for you to decide. Speaking of you deciding how you feel about texts…

Added "Skip Story Texts" and "Skip Uberhub" options. The first one does exactly what you expect and the second one automatically leads you to the next level after beating one, rather than returning you to the hub world. This allows you to have that authentic playthrough-in-one-sitting-without-interruptions experience. I got this idea from a super old alternate release of ERaZor called “Straight Version”. Rather than making it a separate ROM again, this time it’s directly built into the game.

Added "Photosensitive Mode" to turn off all flashy lights and camera shakes. This is an option that most people won’t ever turn on and that’s fine, but I definitely wanted to have it here. Over the years I’ve learned a lot about the seriousness of epilepsy and I don’t want to be responsible for anything. And seeing how this update was all themed around accessibility, it made perfect sense to include it here.

And finally, added a new unlockable option, tons of new easter eggs, and in general just did a ton of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements I can’t even begin to all list



So that’s the summary of some of the bigger changes. Now let’s talk about the philosophy shift I mentioned earlier.

Like I said, I watched many playthroughs of the game throughout the years, and I realized the biggest issue with ERaZor isn’t anything like buggy coding, the biggest one was lackluster game design itself. I saw so many people getting frustrated at challenges someone with just the slightest bit more experience would’ve breezed through without even thinking twice.

So, the answer seems simple, right? Just make the game easier. There’s just one small problem with that: the difficulty is, like, the whole point of ERaZor. Some people call it a Kaizo hack, which it very much isn't at all, but it can be tough and that's very much by design. Well, make it harder then and screw the noobs? If that’s the mindset you want to adapt for your Sonic hack, go ahead. But that’s not what I was going for. Again, accessibility was always the main focus for this update.

What do we do then? It looks like no matter what we choose, it’s going to alienate someone.

Introducing: Casual and Frantic Mode! This is the single largest change ERaZor has received since... ever. Seriously, this basically doubled the game in content.

The tl;dr summary is that this is a difficulty selection screen. But that doesn’t really do it justice. It would be really easy to make a hard mode that just removes all rings and gives the bosses more health, but that's ultra lame.

Rather, the idea was to make both modes equally viable to play, even if you've already beaten the game a million times. Sometimes you want to get kicked in the butt by the game to try your best, sometimes you just wanna have a chill session. Likewise, because of the hurdle being a bit too much for quite a lot of new players, the split allows those to experience the full game without immediately getting brickwalled. Once they become more comfortable, they can still tackle Frantic Mode!

But what exactly are the differences? Like I said, both modes are equally viable to play, and this was achieved through the overarching theme of pressure. Or, in the case of Casual, the absence thereof. Let's look at both options to see what this means:

CASUAL: This is going to be the new baseline difficulty and is recommended for newcomers. The main focus is that you can largely make it through the game at your own pace, and most challenges that punish you for mistakes or standing still have had that hecticness disabled, such as the ring drain in Ruined Place. This allows for a much more relaxed experience and won't force you to restart if you fail too many times. But at the same time, the core game is still there and just as fun as ever!

FRANTIC: If Casual was the mode that reduced pressure, Frantic is the exact opposite. It has a lot of raw adjustments to make it harder, sure, but your biggest new challenge is more along the lines of "removing the idea of taking-it-easy itself". This is largely done through two major changes: Increased punishments and reduced downtime. In other words, this is not a regular hard mode, it's specifically about keeping you going at all times. Awareness and quick reflexes are a must if you want to make it through. But that’s not everything. One of my favorite things to do in ERaZor is throwing curve balls at players, and Frantic gave me a perfect opportunity to that a few times. You will see.



And that covers the general idea of casual and frantic mode, and also wraps up this video with everything I could tell you without spoiling anything. I really hope you’ll enjoy this remaster and leave the previous six versions collecting dust in the discount bin because that’s where they belong. I just really hope this truly will be the final version for real this time. If there’s ever going to be an ERaZor 8 I will probably go mental.

Thanks for watching. Bye bye!

 

Yo, update is out. Check out the first post for all the info and the download!