Sonic Xtreme

[esadajr]

Like I said, the hip thing today is to troll and hate on Sonic and Sega.

Going back to the Sonic Xtreme code discovery, it is cool to see code from the mid 90s in a displayable form, even if it wasn't going to be that great of a game.

[SamIAm]

I love the Saturn, but to make a fun 3D Sonic game on it, especially one that feels at all like a Sonic game should feel, would have been very difficult. There's more than one way to do it, but the designers would have needed to base their entire approach very strictly on the capabilities of the system.

Unfortunately, with all the platform changes and design revisions, this just wasn't happening with Xtreme. When you look at what they were attempting, it seems like they were lost in thinking about high-level theoretical 3D game concepts. The fish-eye lens and gravity rotation ideas, which were practically the whole foundation of Xtreme's game design, were pretty gross overreaches IMO. Even with more time and resources at their disposal, I don't think they would have ever made a good game on the Saturn out of those ideas.

The leaked Saturn build that's based on a totally different engine, however, at least gives me enough imagine a fun game with. Sonic's prerendered sprite looks really good, and the simplified engine is actually running at 60fps. The control feels good, too. If they had gotten something like that going way, way earlier on and built a simple, linear platformer out of it, I think they could have had something nice.

[Lost Monkey]

I love the Saturn, but to make a fun 3D Sonic game on it, especially one that feels at all like a Sonic game should feel, would have been very difficult. There's more than one way to do it, but the designers would have needed to base their entire approach very strictly on the capabilities of the system.

Unfortunately, with all the platform changes and design revisions, this just wasn't happening with Xtreme. When you look at what they were attempting, it seems like they were lost in thinking about high-level theoretical 3D game concepts. The fish-eye lens and gravity rotation ideas, which were practically the whole foundation of Xtreme's game design, were pretty gross overreaches IMO. Even with more time and resources at their disposal, I don't think they would have ever made a good game on the Saturn out of those ideas.

The leaked Saturn build that's based on a totally different engine, however, at least gives me enough imagine a fun game with. Sonic's prerendered sprite looks really good, and the simplified engine is actually running at 60fps. The control feels good, too. If they had gotten something like that going way, way earlier on and built a simple, linear platformer out of it, I think they could have had something nice.

I think Sonic R's engine was about as far as that whole thing could go on Saturn.

If they used the NiGHts/Burning Rangers approach, they probably could have come up with something pretty cool...

[VenomMacbeth]

I find the Saturn to be pretty limited as per 3D games; even the "best" ones seem readily outdone by those of its 32-bit contemporaries.

Honestly, in my opinion, with how Adventure turned out (even though I love it to death) they could have easily pulled something similar off on the Saturn.  Sure, the textures, polygon count, draw distance, and perhaps gameplay speed/framerate would have suffered, but it probably would have been an even bigger landmark than it was on the Dreamcast. 

I wonder, if Sega had use the Adventure formula for a Saturn Sonic game, would the resulting success have encouraged them to actually improve on said formula for later games, instead of churning out shovelware every year or two.  I think other than the PS1 looming on the horizon, I'm willing to bet lots of people choked on the Saturn since Sega choked on putting a Sonic game out for it.

[SamIAm]

I think Sonic R's engine was about as far as that whole thing could go on Saturn.

Sonic R gets a lot of flak, but the framerate is pretty good, the rendering is clean, and the environments look nice. It definitely could have been tweaked into platformer if they had wanted it to be one.

The Saturn has trouble drawing wide open areas because of the way its rendering works. The guy who made the Saturn port of Quake talked about this. Basically, you can't use only one giant polygon to draw a large surface because it will distort too much when only part of it is on screen. Since everything has to be made of multiple smaller polygons, it works better to use a linear/rail kind of approach to the level design.

[DragonmasterDan]

Sonic R gets a lot of flak, but the framerate is pretty good, the rendering is clean, and the environments look nice. It definitely could have been tweaked into platformer if they had wanted it to be one.

Can you feel the sunshine? Does it lighten up your day? Don't you wish that racing game, was actually fun to play?

[esadajr]

I think Sonic R's engine was about as far as that whole thing could go on Saturn.

Sonic R gets a lot of flak, but the framerate is pretty good, the rendering is clean, and the environments look nice. It definitely could have been tweaked into platformer if they had wanted it to be one.

Once you get used to the controls, the game is not that bad. Is not the best Saturn game or anything but still quite enjoyable and shouldn't be absent from your Saturn/PC/GC library.

Take it for what it is, a weird game 3D game developed by Traveler Tales, the same company which brought us Sonic 3D Blast (another game you should take for what it is).

[Lost Monkey]

Sonic R gets a lot of flak, but the framerate is pretty good, the rendering is clean, and the environments look nice. It definitely could have been tweaked into platformer if they had wanted it to be one.

Can you feel the sunshine? Does it lighten up your day? Don't you wish that racing game, was actually fun to play?

I love the soundtrack. 

[esadajr]

now I can't shake that one out of my head

[SignOfZeta]

I do love the soundtrack.