Unofficial Sonic Unleashed Port

Thanks, that did the trick.

 

Started playing some of the DLC levels since I've never played them before, and honestly they're a lot easier and way more fun than I was expecting, took maybe 15-20 minutes at most to get them figured out and hit at least an A rank, and it felt really good

This port is changing how I feel about this game and I'm kinda shook all it took was 60fps

 

For someone telling others to get off their high horse you sure are riding Ganon's Giant Stallion yourself. While the line between emulation and recompilaton is blurry this project was an actual port. The Unleashed Recompilaton only targets one specific game so it only translate the 360 code used by said game and not the entire platform. It basically automates the porting process. Instead of going line by line porting Xenon code into modern platforms it recompile said code automatically instead. It is an advancement in technology and IMO this is the future of porting games, specially if a developer loses their source code which sadly happens more than you think (Sonic Unleashed being a big example BTW). While you need system developers who know the source and target hardware and it's respective libraries it is still a great feat of engineering.

As for the Unleashed Recompilaton project itself. The port is very well optimized and can even run on a Steam Deck (good luck trying that on Xenia at 60fps). And runs at stable 60fps by default on it except on good ol Jungle Joyride but that's to expected. Of course on a modern mainstream desktop PC there's no frame drops by default. There's a lot of options to play with and they can be changed at any time which is really cool. Support for both Xbox and PlayStation button layout which changes all button prompts to the selected platform is also very cool. Overall this is a great port of the original game and I commend the people involved in this.

 

Turns out the community already got a macOS build for ARM working! Beat the first level- not fully released yet, but seems to be stable (with a lil unstable performance in places on an M4 Mac Mini). https://github.com/squidbus/UnleashedRecomp/actions/runs/13664475029

This is incredible. And us macOS users didn't even get left out, in fact we are getting fed nicely!

 

Absolutely incredible. This is actually my first time playing the game, thanks to this port.
I beat it just now (not 100%, just finished the story), and found no single issue. Amazing work.

Spoiler: My opinions on the game (not the port, but the game itself. The existence of this port is amazing on its own)

So this is the first time I actually got to play Unleashed.
I didn't go to it blindly though. I watched Clement's playthrough many years ago, although I did not pay much attention to the werehog stages because they were pretty boring to watch. I rewatched the cutscenes recently when I was trying to understand the timeline due to the events of Frontiers. And I played the daytime stages on the Unleashed Project in Generations a while ago - and, funnily enough, I did not like them very much.
Also, I knew the nighttime stages drag too long, I knew Eggmanland was infamous, and I knew the medal requirements are atrocious.
But knowing and playing are two different things, of course.

So here's what I thought of the game. VERY LATE (almost 20 years late) but yeah.

• Presentation / product quality

Very, very good. Miles better than what came after it - Colors, Generations, Lost World (never played), Forces (never played) and Frontiers. Even Shadow Generations, which was good, I don't think it was as good as Unleashed.

• Hub worlds

They were fine. Would I prefer it without them? Yes. But they make sense in this game. We're not playing in an island or a city, it's the entire world. It's interesting to know the other cultures we're visiting.

• Entrance stages

I hate them. I'm okay with the hub worlds, but at the end of the day I just want to play the levels. The entrance stages are like a second hub world, but an annoying one. The levels are not always easy to find, and very often the game makes you platform to get there - which is boring with the werehog and irritating with Sonic, which was not made for platforming at all.
There was no reason for the entrance stages to be this troublesome. Just put the levels well arranged and we're good to go.

• Music

Very good. But the werehog battle song got me tired in the first level. I love this port for the option of disabling it.

• Story

Ehh... I mean, the story itself is good. Okay, at least. The plot is enjoyable. Chip is nice, and his interactions with Sonic are also nice.
But there's a tone mismatch that bothers me. The whole planet was split apart, the world is ending. And everyone is... fine? Nobody seems to care that the Earth is shattered in pieces? Were people already used to the idea, after Advance 3 broke the planet in seven dimensions or something? Forces were rightfully criticized because it tries too hard to take the events seriously, but Unleashed does the opposite. The events are serious, but sure, try this ice cream, it's delicious.
And the werehog thing... Sonic became a werehog BEFORE Dark Gaia woke up? But isn't the werehog related to Dark Gaia's influence? I'm assuming Eggman's tech was using some of the Dark Gaia's energy to shoot the planet and to trap Sonic, instead of a simple beam of energy, but I have no idea how he managed to have this.
Besides, how does the Dark vs Light Gaias make sense? Wasn't Light Gaia supposed to be a fucking kaiju too? Chip had never seen the world before, how are his temples scattered across the globe? And his Megazord were buried inside the planet at the end of the game, won't he need it the next time? I don't get it.

• Gameplay
  • Daytime stages

For some reason I enjoyed them way better than when I played them on the Unleashed Project in Generations. I don't know why.
But what I disliked about them on Unleashed Project I still did on Unleashed. I can't see what I'm supposed to dodge because of the 2D/2.5D camera. Even the things I can see, when the camera is in 3D, sometimes I can't dodge either (like falling pillars and icicles, I'm probably just bad). But in general, when I can fully see what's ahead, it's fun.

• Nighttime stages

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Jesus fucking Christ. I finished the first level in like 15, 20 minutes. I was thinking to myself "man, I'm really bad at this". Eventually I got the hang of it, but somehow I was taking 30 minutes now. Why are these levels so fucking long? It's three or four times the length of a daytime stage.
I mean, maybe I could stand them if they were fun to play. But 30 minutes of boredom?
And I really hated when there were platforming sections right after a battle. Because many times the checkpoint was only before the battle, not after. So if I die missing a jump, I had to battle those things again.
By the way, I remember people saying the werehog would be better if instead of the werehog it was Knuckles. I mean, sure, Knuckles would be a better choice than Sonic becoming a werewolf. But the main problem is not the character, but the gameplay.

• Eggmanland

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I took SEVENTY MINUTES to finish this. Fuck this level.

• Difficulty

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Harder than I expected. At some point of the game I had more than 20 lives, almost 30 I guess. I beat the game with only 2 lives remaining. Eggmanland and the two phases of the final boss dried it all.
Something I really didn't like is that you die for any mistake. Missed a jump? Death. Missed a quick time event that lasts half of a second? Death. Your foot slipped when you were tiptoeing? Death. The target on a pole didn't show up in time and you couldn't grab it? Death.

• Medal collection

Like I said, I knew this was a pain. I knew I had to get 120 sun medals from a total of 200. So I played with care, searching for these fuckers everywhere. Hub worlds, entrance stages, nighttime stages - but not the daytime stages, because at least some fun I need to have. And when I got to the daytime stages in Adabat, I had... 121 medals. ONE MEDAL more than the minimum.
I mean, sure, I probably missed some extra levels. I did not bother to do those missions from the hot dog guy. But I just want to enjoy the story and finish the game. And man... I looked EVERYWHERE, and I only got 1 medal above the bare minimum. I can only imagine those who did not know this requirement when they were playing for the first time. It's ridiculous.

• Overall

I wanna say I liked this game, but I didn't. The daytime stages are fine and all, but 75% of the game is werehog. And I'm sorry, but the werehog is boring as hell.
While I don't think the game deserved the bashing it got, I also don't think it deserves such praise some people give. Maybe it's the same phenomenon that I think happens with the storybook games - people say they love them because they only watched the cutscenes on Youtube, but did not actually played them, or were too young to remember the quirks.

 

Too soon ?

 

i take all of that back... unleashed has ZERO SOUL, ZERO REDEEMING QUALITIES, CRITICS WERE RIGHT TO SHIT ON IT BACK IN 2008, NO ONE'S FAVOURITE GAME IS SONIC UNLEASHED

Spoiler

jk. maybe...

 

I just shared my opinions playing the game for the first time ever, on the previous page. I feel better reading this. I thought I was being too harsh, now I'm vindicated and I choose to believe the opinions that agree with mine.

 

Honestly, even knowing it's probably not a good fit from a game design perspective, so far I find poking around the Day stages for collectibles oddly charming. Windmill Isle in particular has these silly little nooks and crannies that have no business being in a boost-style stage, but I appreciate their existence and I think they go well with the game's locales based on real regions people actually live in. (It also helps that you only have to grab each one once, even if you die or restart from the pause menu.)

 

quiz lady disappeared right after doing the quiz in shamar. rip art book 40 I guess

 

Have you installed the DLC? That bug got patched via one of the DLC packs, not through a typical update. I remember her disappearing from my game back in the day and only coming back after the DLC was released.

 

I went through the same issues as Jason earlier that after having installed my disc copy and all the DLC packs to my 360 HDD and faffing about with connecting it to my computer, the Velocity software provided as part of the dumping guide would not recognise anything on the HDD, so I too had to consult the seven seas. Everything's so smooth on my machine, and being able to play as the Werehog and enjoy the night level themes without being interrupted by frantic jazz ad nauseam is incredibly refreshing. Seeing in-game cutscenes running at 60fps feels bizarre, especially compared to official Sonic releases that support 60fps gameplay keeping their cutscenes at 30fps, but as long as they look so clean I'm not complaining much.

So Brenda has a bug that's fixed in one of the DLC packs? Welp, that's something I gotta cover for the wiki then. Which DLC pack fixes this?

 

The Quiz Lady is Sandra. Brenda is just another lady who... gives you quizzes. Lol that's confusing. Anyway, Apparently it was the Chun-Nun DLC pack contained the stealth patch.

 

Finished the recomp earlier this morning. Dunno if I have much else to say, this project is an unprecedented success on a technical level, and lets Unleashed shine at its (vanilla) best. But yeah, I still mostly don't like the game, and not just because I am extremely tired of its unearned position as a measuring stick for Sonic fans to rip on other, often better Sonic games (although that certainly doesn't help).

I've S-ranked the game before so I didn't feel like I needed to this time, but I did play every level. I know for a fact that the 100% experience is a damn nightmare, I tried to do it last time and felt my soul leaving my body on the fucking hotdog missions, and I couldn't even find all the town missions, because you have to obsessively check both the day and night versions of every NPC in every hub, and it is simply not worth the effort. I'm not sure any Sonic game has interesting NPCs.

Eggmanland took me a clean 20 minutes, which is probably the fastest I've ever done it, so that was neat I guess. For all people talk about its length, it doesn't feel that far off from your average werehog stage. Really I just hate the insane camera swings it pulls on you during certain platforming sections, though that's hardly unique to this level. I do still want to see the Wii stages brought over just so I can compare its solo-Sonic version of Eggmanland.

Dark Gaia is intensely dogshit as a fight. Not as much as Time Eater, I can still tell what's happening at least, but the colossus isn't fun to pilot, and then the running sections with Sonic are a great idea for a boss but their design is way too stop-and-go and being timed on it sucks, then you have like...thirty seconds of flying forward as Super Sonic? And then the worst game of NiGHTS into Dreams you've ever played smacking Dark Gaia's energy tentacles until you anticlimactically fly into him for the finale. And all of this is punctuated with quick time events. God, I'm glad those mostly disappeared after this game, they're everywhere in Unleashed. I don't like that Frontiers made gestures in that direction, but at least all of those are piss-easy.

Also, "skipping the end cutscene and credits" is another great mod idea.

 

Since a lot of this topic has an aura of "great port but here's why this game still sucks", I just wanted to say I've been having a great time with it the past few days. Admittedly I've played this run with mods that decreased the medal count and the EXP requirements for stats, but I've also played this game a good three times over in vanilla. So it's not like I don't know how it feels to play it at it's least becoming. Anyways.

Daytime stages are as great as ever, albeit with the extra acts and DLC stages being a mixed bag. I like the ones that go more exploratory or ramp up the difficulty, but I'm not too keen on the X-2s and X-3s. I do wish Sonic's Generations physics were present (didn't think I'd be saying that), but I do very much believe the main acts are the best of the boost trilogy. Replaying those levels is like crack to me. Boot up this game and I gotta do the whole line before I close it.

I'll be the first maybe here to say that I like the Werehog levels a lot. If you take the time to learn how it moves you can get around with a lot of flow. Especially after maxing out your stats, you can really make a meal out of speedrunning those levels. I currently have under 10 minutes for each Werehog Act 1 stage. Gonna see how much more I can cut into it later, because I know there are places I can cut it further down.

The hubs are wonderful and atmospheric; I love interacting with the NPCs and doing their little side quests. There's a lot of cute dialogue in this game that goes unseen by most people, I love that kind of attention to detail. I especially love throwing all the food at Chip just to see what he says. There's just so much to dig into if you're willing to give it a chance.

But yeah, game's very good. Not perfect; God knows it's flawed. But I like it a lot.

 

I haven't gotten around to trying this yet. But it's amazing this exists. I wonder what modders will do to try to fix the Werehog levels. Is there already a mod that makes them skippable?

I have to say, it honestly surprises me how strongly some people feel about the hubs. I've always seen them as just a short harmless distraction, as they're fairly small, you don't have to interact with most NPCs, and getting to Pickle's lab is rather quick as Sonic. In fact it was really nice seeing all the different locales all over the world, although I'll admit I never cared for the NPCs. I'm not opposed to NPCs in theory, but many of them felt about as annoying and over the top as the Deadly Six, and I'm not big on their mannerisms and Pixar-esque designs.

 

Yeah, I installed all the DLC around when I started the game. Maybe I should try reinstalling the chun-nan pack...

 

I changed my mind after playing Jungle Joyride's day stage. Sonic Unleashed rocks sometimes

 

A little unrelated to Unleashed but rather about XenonRecomp in general. This tool has frustrated the hell out of me. Had to jump through 30 hoops to first get it to compile because VS2022 didn't want to use the right version of Clang and I ended up just using Mingw64, which seemed to have compiled properly. But even then, and after I configured the TOMLs for my game, XenonRecomp just hanged on me and didn't generate any code. Really wanted to get that XBLA remaster of Goldeneye going on PC...