Unofficial Sonic Unleashed Port

Werehog gameplay feels so much better at high framerates, although it also really shows some of the things it's missing such as animation cancels and how much dead time there is after you finish a combo or a QTE.

 

Major tip about the werehog that makes playing with him just so, sooooo much more managable: He has a HUGE wind up delay when you try to grab a ledge. This is probably one of the single biggest faults with the game that sours people's opinions of the werehog. They'll jump for a ledge, press the button to grab, but sonic won't react immediately. Thinking the game didn't register the button press, they'll release the button, then press and hold it again. Except it DID register the first time, it was just in the wind up. So the game will see you as immediately letting go, and you'll fall off the ledge.

The tip? Trust that you'll grab the ledge, even if you don't see a reaction. Just hold the button while you fall. You'll stretch your arms out and grab it without fail, you actually have a HUGE range to grab ledges and can reach them from very far down below them. If you just trust that your button press will come out, you will never, ever fail a single platform in the game as the werehog. With this in mind, the werehog actually has some incredibly fun platforming segments that I liked much more than the combat.

One of my wishes would be a way to remove the enemy gates so you could just run through the werehog levels without stopping, and concentrate on platforming instead of combat. I honestly feel removing the barriers would completely fix the werehogs reputation, as stages would go from maybe 10-15 minutes long, to 3-4 minutes. It'd be a much shorter game, but a much more focused one.

Another tip: You can get quite a few medals outside of the levels themselves, just from the hubs or by talking to the NPCs. The first time I played the game, I got a big boost by doing this at the end of the game.

I've been having a hell of a time getting it built on my ubuntu box, too. Just one of those things that has lots and lots of moving parts.

 

Update v1.0.2 was released.

• Fixed a potential crash that could occur on first launch after installing the game.
• Fixed graphical issues that would occur when anti-aliasing was enabled for Intel GPUs.
• Added an error message for users with CPUs that do not support the AVX instruction set.
• Implemented integrity checks for D3D12 DLL files.
• Implemented a safeguard to prevent the game from being closed during auto-saving.
• Updated the audio backend to force WASAPI on Windows, addressing certain audio issues.
• Adjusted the FPS slider to allow locking the frame rate to 240 FPS.
• Fixed an issue where lasers wouldn't turn off in Spagonia after obtaining the Wall Jump Shoes with hints disabled.
• Fixed a few typos in the localized text for custom menus.
• Fixed the "Homing Attack On Jump" code not working correctly in Cool Edge Act 3 (Day).
• Added a Hedge Mod Manager code to disable the boost filter on background music.
• Added a Hedge Mod Manager code to disable D-Pad movement.

 

Question: How are Xbox titles handled on the Xbox 360? Are the static recompilation and thus their own PPC binaries? And if so, does that mean this decompiler could be used to get Xbox games running natively on a PC? Because a port of Panzer Dragoon Orta would be unbelievable.

 

did not have a non-nintendo console until 2014, and unwiished was one of the first games that i played when i was old enough to know that things like "ports" existed and that i was playing the inferior version, which made kid-me resent it. i say this to say i'm playing this recomp (on steam deck with pretty great overall performance) as my first experience with the proper game.

i'm a little over halfway through, and i have been rapidly ricocheting between "maybe the unleashed diehards have a point" and "the unleashed diehards are smoking crack." on one hand, i do think that the main day stages here overall are better than any boost game that's come since - they have fully realized locales that aren't slavish imitations of previous sonic games (or mario galaxy or breath of the wild lmao), they're actually designed around the strengths of the boost formula, and sonic's handling here is just massively better than in generations, at least in the 3D sections. it's kind of crazy how much better he feels to move around in a game that's five years older.

on the other hand, there's a wealth of design decisions that are just straight-up unforgivable. people accuse sa1's hub worlds of being unnecessary padding - compared to unleashed they might as well be the siofra river well. the werehog, even at its best, is a totally pedestrian character-action game (and it is frequently not at its best). the cutscenes are unskippable, the stomp doesn't halt your horizontal momentum (i guess this is an improvement generations made that i never appreciated), and i know it was 2007 but the density of the quicktime events is just completely absurd - i had to switch to a ps4 controller because i felt like i was being penalized for having never owned a microsoft console and still pressing the nintendo button positions. also, i continue to be amazed that sonic has brought back sky chase four times now, and that it's literally never been good.

despite all that, i can't help but feel like this is the last time sega really swung for the fences. i don't think they've topped this game's art direction, and it's really embarrassing how much the fact that this game has fully original levels and level themes is, like, a luxury feature now. i think i hate this game, but because of its earnest ambition and originality, but i can't help but respect it more than what came after.

 

What's wrong with SA1 Sky Chase?

 

It takes forever, can't be made to go faster, and has some rancid missions.

 

I guess you must hate games like Panzer Dragoon and Rez then, which play very similarly.

 

I just wish Unleashed's Tornado level button prompts didn't hide behind each other.

 

Just pointing this out - cutscenes are actually fully skippable and always have been! All you have to do is mash the pause button a few times. I've no idea why Sonic Team chose to implement it that way and why there's no indication that they're skippable, but yeah, there you go. I remember it being a bit of a criticism back in the day and just yesterday a friend was getting annoyed about having to sit through the cutscenes in the port until I told him they were skippable. It's very easy to miss.

There's a button accessibility mod that I downloaded right away. Every button prompt shows all four face buttons in their correct correct configuration and highlights the one you need to press. This is kind of what Nintendo has been doing as standard since releasing the Switch (because single Joy con have different buttons) and it's an absolute God send.

I firmly believe that we should start referring to to console face buttons by compass direction. If I say "press X to jump", that could mean three different buttons depending on which of the three major controller layouts I'm referring to. And if I said "press triangle to do the other thing", that assumes immediate knowledge of where triangle is. But North/South/West/East is universal across layouts.

Same. Except I also hate it because the people that allowed it to happen were so incredibly fucking dense. After Shadow and 06 (and even the somewhat tepid reception of Heroes and the GCN Adventure games ports), Sonic was in a rut. SEGA should never have greenlit a a game where the majority of the playtime was spent in very basic, generic brawler platformer as an easy-to-mock werewolf Sonic. And after the shit show that was 06, they should have known better than to release something that ran so poorly. Of course Unleashed was going to get dog piled.

I've always thought that if the games were released in the order "06 > Colours > Generations > Unleashed", then Unleashed would have had a much better chance. Personally however I just don't like Unleashed. It's not got nearly enough good gameplay to outweigh the bad, even if I do adore the world and atmosphere it sets up. It's kind of put on a pedestal because it got criticised for the wrong reasons during the height of the "hating Sonic is cool" era and it was the least time SEGA really gave the series the AAA treatment (despite ignoring it pretty much ever since). It's such a weird case study.

I mean... What's wrong with that? But anyway, SA1 Sky Chase is a chore. It shows up 4 times across two stories and takes a long time to beat. It asks very little if the player and offers very little to engage them. I hate to say it, but the best Tornado levels in the series might just be the ones in S4E2 and Lost World.

 

I wish Unleashed got ported to PC back in the day because Sonic fans deserved to experience Games for Windows Live

 

I've experienced games for windows live, the Rockstar launcher, Ubisoft launcher, blizzard launcher, EA launcher (origin and the new one), and installed many games that required the code on the box, without having the box for those games.

I don't care if being a sonic fan makes me a borderline criminal, I've earned my right to be a trash connoisseur in peace.

 

Hating Rez should be illegal. And I say this as someone who has never been a big fan of rail shooters

Anyway, SA1 Sky Chase was fine for what it was. A minigame rail shooter. I never expected much more depth than what it had from either a minigame or a rail shooter, and never found it a chore as its music track is an absolute banger -- I could listen to it for ten times as long as it takes to beat Sky Chase.

 

Maxing out the Steam Deck OLED's GPU and CPU options (the latter through Decky/Powertools) lets you play a pretty shocking amount of the game at 90fps. I'm pretty surprised- the day stages generally feel spectacular like this, although I've yet to get to Arid Sands and beyond. There are also fps drops with some stages faring better than others, and the battery life gets cut down to about 2.5 hours, but man is it something to behold on a portable screen.

Unfortunately, the Werehog and Adventure maps can have some pretty hefty, frequent, and prolonged framerate drops if you're trying to stay at 90fps. On the flipside though, 60fps with these maxed-out preferences is very consistent seemingly everywhere, with drops being infrequent, tiny, and very brief. At least so far... curious how something like, say, Adabat stacks up.

 

You can use mods to turn down the werehog's fur complexity which will make the night stages run much better on the steam deck.

They're not, press start.

 

crazy that i have to mash it. i could have sworn i slammed every button on the controller. i'll check to see if it's weird on deck or something

this is the same logic as saying that if i hate the werehog then i must hate devil may cry. i say this as an sa1 defender - sky chase is a complete snoozefest. as a rail shooter, it just sucks, and the fact that it directly follows chaos 4 certainly doesn't help.

however, it is definitely better than literally just having it be one prolonged quicktime event like in unleashed - what were they even thinking with that? why even bother putting that into the game?

 

I think that's a poor comparison. DMC and the werehog aren't even the same genre - one is a hack 'n slash, the other more of a beat 'em up. But even if they were, their gameplay is nothing alike. SA1 Sky Chase, on the other hand, plays just like Panzer Dragoon and Rez, right down to the target lock-on feature.

 

Regardless of opinions on SA1, Tornado Defence is a 5 minute QTE that regularly blocks your view of button prompts with other button prompts. One of the best things about Unleashed recompiled is the fact that people wasted no time in creating multiple mods that allow you to bypass it entirely.

Yes, this post is barely on topic. I'm just trying to steer it back in the right direction but there's very little I can actually say about this project that wouldn't be better suited to a general Unleashed thread (that I can't be bothered to make tonight).

 

Yeah ok, sorry about that

Anyone know if there are any mods that make the werehog levels optional yet? It seems like such an obvious thing to mod in, seeing how they're the most infamous part of Unleashed. Personally speaking, they're the only thing that makes the thought of replaying Unleashed feel like a chore.

 

Nothing that I can see yet in Game Banana. There are plenty of mods that improve progression by either reducing or removing medal requirements, so if you can stomach the Werehog stages then you're at least able to play them without the stress of needing to explore. You can just beeline. Plus there are other mods that help with EXP and leveling, further reducing the burden of Werehog stages without removing the outright. Once you put enough EXP into strength, fights will go by relatively fast.

I wonder, is it a bit more difficult to remove the Werehog stages entirely? I assume that due to the semi-non-linear nature of the game that it'll mess up certain flags and triggers if you skip levels that the game expects you to go to. I'm sure it can be done, but it'll just take take a bit of time.

Spoiler

inb4 someone "helpfully" suggests you play the Project Unleashed mod for Generations

I made it to Empire City today. Can't believe how much the game seems to chug in the hub. And by that I mean it can't get above 60fps at max settings. It's so strange, because nothing about that specific area seems to be particularly demanding. Is it the big fountain? It was always a sore spot for performance even back on the 360. I want to get to Jungle Joyride just for the sake of comparison.