Sonic X-treme should have been Sonic the Hedgehog‘s 3D debut on the Saturn, except it was cancelled in 1997. Diehard fans haven’t given up on the game, though, and someone recently ported Sonic X-Treme onto modern PCs. The dream of Sonic X-treme will never die, it seems!
The news was announced on the Sonic Retro forums to much joy and celebration.
This is just the start. There’s only one level in the current built, but they’re hoping to add more.
However, We’d like to point out that this is a single level release.( More builds and levels to come later !)
We would also like you to know that this is an almost as is port of the engine (Almost as how the original developers had left it, A snapshot in time “if you will”.
This first public release consists of a Jungle level, which I like to refer to as “The E3 Jade Gully level” since it was shown in one of the E3 96 Promo videos.
Comments
9 responses to “Cancelled Sonic Game Brought Back To Life After 18 Years”
I will probably get some hate for this but I think it looks and plays terrible. This is from a 32yr old who grew up playing Sonic on the Master System/ Mega drive. But hey that’s just My opinion.
On a side note it did kind of remind me of Marble blast Ultra an old XBLive Arcade game.
Marble Blast. So good.
Nah you’re right. It’s essentially one of those early 3D games where they didn’t know what they needed to do to translate the game from 2D to 3D, and even if they did know they didn’t have the power to pull it off. It wasn’t until later on that Crash Bandicoot nailed a (slower) version of what the original Sonic games translate to if you put them in 3D.
Totally agree, they cancelled it because they knew it was awful.
the screenshot made me instantly think of NiGHTS…. the video made me kinda thankful it never came out :\
the saturn just didn’t do 3d well enough in my opinion for a game like this to be worth it… sonic adventure on the dreamcast was great for the time, so i think they made the right choice by not making this the first proper 3d sonic game
hats off to these guys for putting the effort in though, never ceases to amaze me what people work on
I hope it’s a huge hit… so huge, in fact, that Blizzard takes note, and finally decides to release WA:LotC.
All this talk of the Saturn not doing 3D ‘well enough’ is pretty bollocks. Games built from the ground up were generally pretty damned great, and whilst it had trouble doing a lot of the effects the PSX was capable of, people tend to base their opinions on games ported from the PSX to the Saturn, whilst paying no mind to games specifically catered to the Saturn. I say this as a Saturn owner – you’ve got some phenomenal stuff like Bulk Slash, Gungriffon and Togue King: The Spirits, all of which look great. Yes, the PSX was more adept at 3D than the Saturn was, but the notion that it couldn’t do 3D ‘well enough’ is misguided. In hindsight, nothing back then did 3D all that well yet – and even the technology behind 3D gaming was still being tested. The PSX did polygons, the Saturn (edit – and some corners of the PC Market) did Quads – different enough technologies that made porting from either enough to be a pain in the backside.
The N64 did a pretty good job I thought. Certainly a lot better than the PSX.
Lets not forget the 3D Sonic world in Sonic Jam, despite it not being very focused on ‘blazing speed’, they kinda nailed how a 3D Sonic game should play on the Saturn.
I was pretty excited for this game when I was a kid, salivating at the thought of a brand new Sonic game coming out on my beloved Sega Saturn. I played the Xtreme build yesterday and it’s pretty rubbish, but yeah I agree with the above, looks like they were still finding their feet and didn’t quite know what to do with the engine they had built.
Also, Sonic was in Christmas Nights, so we got 2 ‘official’ 3D based sonic games.. oh and the Sonic 3D Blast special stages were completely in 3D too.
Man, Sega shoulda tried harder for the Sonic franchise on the Saturn.
If I remember correctly the Saturn wasn’t ideal for 3d games as the final hardware was a snap decision when Sega saw what the playstation was doing.
Didn’t it have two 3d capable processors thrown in at the last minute? Virtual fighter was great as one chip each did one character but it struggled immensely to match the ps1 as far as polygon count was concerned.
What build of Xtreme was this trying to reproduce? Where is the fish eye lens?
I remember having fun with the Sonic Jam 3D world too. Grabbing all the rings in a time limit was pretty frantic and the kind of mechanic I imagined would inform a 3D sonic in the future. I’m still waiting for an open world Sonic game.