The annual Sonic Amateur Games Expo — or SAGE for short — kicked off today with a pair of Sega Saturn projects as well as a sendup of a Saturn favorite.
One of them is Sonic Ringworlds, developed by several members of the Shiro and SegaXtreme community, including AM25, ShadowJackal, SGRyan, Hitomi2500, Manofstone17, Dalton, Cheeto Hog and Chidow.
It’s planned to be a Sonic Adventure-like game for the Saturn. The team wasn’t able to get more than a proof-of-concept demo finished in time for the initial submission deadline for SAGE 2022, but they plan on updating the downloadable BIN/CUE/ISO files in a couple of days with “new models, new animations and actual gameplay,” according to project director AM25.
He gave a preview of that update in the Shiro Discord:
The demo is hit or miss in emulators — it doesn’t run correctly in Mednafen but it does run well in Yaba Sanshiro. It also runs on real hardware, although AM25 said it loads very slowly.
The other Saturn project at SAGE 2022 is the latest build of Voxel’s Sonic Xtreme. He’s attempting to bring together levels, bosses, menus, smooth gameplay and fun gimmicks into a single package – complete with that famous fisheye camera effect.
The current demo has a pretty flashy presentation, including a cinematic of the SAGE 2022 logo right off the bat and another video of gameplay playing in the background of the level select menu.
It includes three playable levels — as well as a fourth incomplete one — and a boss fight against Nack the Weasel. It uses many of the assets that were created originally by Sega for Sonic Xtreme in 1996.
As for playing it, Voxel’s Sonic Xtreme does run on original hardware. As for emulators, the demo’s page on the SAGE 2022 website says:
“For the best experience, it’s strongly recommended to use Mednafen. While all aspects of the game run fine in Yabause/YabaSanshiro/Kronos, there are some glaring audio and visual issues that stem from incorrect emulation, not the game itself.”
— Voxel
The last Saturn-related project at SAGE this year is Over Jump Rally, an indie homage to the legendary arcade rally racing game from 1994, Sega Rally, recreated in Unreal Engine 5.
It’s being made by Alessandro Schiassi, who has been a visual effects supervisor and visual effects artist for the past 16 years.
As for why he chose to recreate Sega Rally, he said on the SAGE 2022 website:
“At the time, the game had one of the best graphics around (if not THE best), running on a Model 2 arcade graphics card. This was an era where arcade games were fairly superior to any console or PC graphics. I spent countless hours playing it on the Sega Saturn, usually battling my brother in Versus mode. I also played the arcade version whenever I found it around. My intent is to create a photo-realistic arcade game as a tribute to the golden age of SEGA.”
— Alessandro Schiassi
He even got Johnny Gioeli, singer of Sonic Adventure soundtrack band Crush40, to sing an original piece of music for Over Jump Rally.
Being a game made with a modern engine, it has to be played on a PC.
The Sonic Amateur Games Expo is an annual non-profit event put together yearly by the people at the Sonic Fan Games HQ forums to support, promote and celebrate the community’s creative efforts. It prominently features fan-made games that are homages or sequels to existing properties like Sonic or Mega Man, but it also shows off completely originally indie games. This year, it runs until Sept. 9.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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