I'm not sure if it's frowned upon to create a thread talking about a project you're not really working on, but I wanted to shine some light on this. If the thread needs to be moved or reformatted, please let me know, I really don't want to step on any toes. A user called Rei-san is working on a patch to replace Kinect motion control with standard controller support for Sonic Free Riders. Apparently, it's very close to release. I've never played any of the Riders games myself, but I can certainly admire the competitive community that's arisen for the series. I've seen quite a few mods for the first two games to give people more content, so I'm kinda happy for them that this game may finally become accessible.
Ironically, this has come around right as I decided to put myself through the hell of playing this game on real hardware. It'll be interesting to see if it holds up mechanically without the Kinect tying it all together, as I've always sort of felt that it asks way too much of you at certain points (mostly looking at things like the ramp partway through Team Dark mission 4 that expects you to go from a flight stance to a perfect >A rank trick back to a flight stance within a matter of seconds.)
Short of LCD games and probably some Sonic Cafe stuff, I think this is among the last Sonic games that couldn't be played on PC up till now, right? Either way, watching this thing progress has been incredible, and the modder in question has done some wacky stuff with Unwiished and 06. Slowly but surely, the hurdles that make some Sonic games unplayable or unbearable are being cleared. What will come next? Proper movement in Secret Rings? Linear progression in Shadow? Only time may tell, but I love this community either way. I mean look at this! If I didn't know better I'd say it was a real video game!
Expert Mode exists, to be fair; it's a gauntlet through every stage, with all of the objectives being replaced with linear ones. For stages like The Doom it puts all of the researchers in one room at the very end. It's pretty fun I'd say, but there's obviously some logistical hurdles to it; no cutscenes, strict lives/saving limitations, and of course the biggest one being that you have to do everything else to access it. I'd like to see it used as a foundation to create a better main game mode, maybe putting in some of the more logical story beats that lead up to the Last Story and changing some of the mission objectives to be goal rings to avoid creating plot holes. Hell, you could even use recap screens to bridge stages that wouldn't otherwise fit together by creating new text synopses.
This is incredible. It might be the biggest thing in Sonic emulation and preservation in...I don't know how long? At least several years. The most significant thing I can think of before this would be Unleashed's campaign becoming fully completable on RPCS3, and even that doesn't really compare to basically an entire decade-old game being opened up to everyone who doesn't want to wave their arms around like a douche in about a month (as of public demonstration at least).
Just played through all the story campaigns getting S ranks on all missions. With a controller, this game isn't really that bad. It isn't good by any means, but its miles better than with the Kinect. The best comparison I can make is turning feels like it does in Mario Kart Tour. The arm flailing is decently handled with the right analog. Going through each campaign, only the speed type characters got to experience any real racing, with Fly and Power only appearing for missions. Most Fly missions were easy, just had to hold jump. Power were simillarly easy. The grind ones just required precise timing on jumps. The ones where you had to maintain a top speed weren't too bad, same with the ring challenges. Its easy to hold jumps to get an S rank trick, making jump challenges a breeze. The one target mission in team dark was stupid easy, just spam the fire button when getting items. The only real difficulty came in the Final Story, where Final Factory kicked my ass a few times only getting A rank. After playing, I do have a desire to go back and play each level with a Fly or Power type character, but looking at their record keeping, just having a counter for how many times you've finished in the top 3 is a unique but lazy implementation. I would have preferred a simple "You did it" gold medal for each track. But the amount of race types is making my completionist tendencies shake their head. There ain't no way I can convince a friend to do a tag race with me to knock these out. Overall, whelmed/10
