Taxman's Sonic CD remake

[FlashTHD]

Supposed to be out tomorrow for five bucks on iOS, Android, XBLA, and PSN (in europe) at least. In case any of you haven't been keeping up, this is not one of Backbone's bloated hack jobs; Sega licensed The Taxman's devtools (that he originally made for fangames, but then took them commercial) and hired him to build Sonic CD from scratch. The result appears nigh dead-on accurate to the original, plus slick extras and both soundtracks! A proper demonstration here:

http://www.4shared.com/video/C5cXpSr1/sonic_cd_xbla_preview.html

There was a legal problem of some sort with the lyrics in the japanese vocal themes, so those are instrumental only. Notice also that the special stages are smoother than ever with UFOs that don't use faked sprite scaling... which i'm not sure I agree with, but ok. (I do hope he removes that self-plug in the startup sequence; when you have a menu option called "STAFF CREDITS" how much ego stroking do you need?) I hear that the BGM for both soundtracks now loop too, though whether the loops are any good appears, well, highly debatable.

At any rate, it's probably a polished release for a goddamn change and I think I want it. $5 is stunning coming from the company that belched out vomit like Sonic 4 Ep 1 for $15. Who's biting?

Also, Kazuyuki Hoshino and the world's most bored narrarator flip through old concept sketches from CD's development while he hopes you'll keep an eye out for details that aren't even in the freaking game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEZkrXaBkl0

[Thunder]

I got this. The spindash is weird.

[FlashTHD]

oshi? Taxman's story about this picture is that they tried to restore the lost zones (Desert Dazzle and Final Fever) to the game, but decided to scrap them anyway.

[FlashTHD]

Tails. His special stage sprites are... actually really ugly. Who the fuck drew those?

[FlashTHD]

Made it up to the point where I usually get bored (Quartz Quadrant). The bottom line here is that this is an excellent conversion, accurate to a T except where they didn't test. This thing could have stood a little more bug squashing attention before release. The most annoying oversight appears if you turn on the CD spindash: the speed cap is instantly invoked whenever you jump. If you have ever tried to go long with the speed shoes or spindash, or even hop while going fast, you will know what a massive pain in the ass this is. (Good luck getting that 1up in Palmtree Panic 3, too.) There's also a gamebreaker in Tidal Tempest that gets the game stuck if you're crushed and don't fall off the screen before you drown.

But hell, even with that it's hard not to recommend this for 5 bucks. The Steam release seems to have been held back to some unknown date, hopefully so a patch can get made for all the potholes they missed. (It may be another matter entirely if the existing releases don't get patched...)

[Thunder]

Sonic CD is now out on Steam, along with Sonic 4 Episode 1. Guess which one costs more.