Back in 1994, the next installment in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise was getting ready to make its jump to the next-gen platform, the 32X. Then called Sonic Mars, an homage to the codename of the 32X, Sega Mars, the project was scrapped due to the desire for more powerful hardware in the form of the Sega Saturn. The game was later unveiled to the public in 1996 at the second E3 trade show using the NiGHTS game engine and under the new title of Sonic X-treme. However, due to programmer/game director duo of Ofer Alon and Chris Senn dropping out of the project doubled with the growing, more advanced competition in the forms of Crash Bandicoot and Super Mario 64, Sonic X-treme was ultimately canceled Christmas of '96. A PC version was attempted before the project was completely put back in the can, but by that time a majority of the faith in the project had been lost. To make matters worse, Chris Senn came down with pneumonia, forcing them to miss their Christmas deadline for the project's completion. The world would not see Sonic in his first full 3-D outing until 1999 in the form of Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast. However, videos from both beta testing and a near-final version of the game have been recently distributed on the web. I don't want you to have to go through 3 to 4 videos, so I decided to post a nice compilation courtesy of craenerX at YouTube. No joke, I'm seriously impressed by the footage, especially for the level of hardware at the time. It looks like Sega was really trying to push the Saturn on this one. And as most Sega fans know, the Saturn was fairly weak in the 3D department when compared to the N64 or even the PlayStation. Bravo to the team that worked on this ill-fated project.
1 comment:
R.I.P.-Sega. As far as I'm concerned, Sega is all but dead. They have had one seriously long string of bad luck throughout their days. The worst of it is that their products are actually very good, in fact, some are outstanding! The Genesis was a strong contendor... but it fell flat. The Saturn had some wonderful games... but it fell flat. And who can forget the Dreamcast, which had some of the greatest, most faithful arcade ports to this day... and also fell flat. Sonic X-treme is just another example of a good product wrapped around the worst of circumstances.
The game itself actually looks pretty solid, with a good mix of the 2D platforming and newer 3D gameplay. Unfortunately, Sonic is well past his prime. It seems that no one can revive his greatness. While Mario continues to reach new heights (literally), Sonic has continually declined in quality. Here's hoping that Bioware can put a fresh spin on the series with their new "Sonic RPG"!
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